Implicit Ambivalence Research Articles

P80: Implicit emotional ambivalence and emotional distress in family carers of people with dementia: Exploratory study.

Objective:Caring for a relative with dementia is a chronic stress situation related to negative consequences such as elevated depressive and anxiety symptoms. A possible mediator variable explored to explain pathways from chronic stress to emotional distress is emotional ambivalence towards the care-recipient (the simultaneous experience of positive and negative feelings towards the care-recipient). Emotional ambivalence, measured with questionnaires, presents significant associations with depression and anxiety in family carers of people with dementia. However, the self-report of emotional ambivalence is susceptible to being influenced by social desirability. The aim of this study is to present preliminary results that analyze implicit ambivalence and its association with emotional distress in family carers of people with dementia.Methods:54 caregivers participated in the study (mean age = 61.2, SD = 12.92, 81.5% women). To explore implicit emotional ambivalence, we adapted a sequential priming paradigm developed to measure implicit ambivalence about significant others (Zayas & Shoda, 2015). Two priming stimuli were used: a) neutral (e.g., RRR) and b) valenced prime (i.e., the name of the care-recipient). The targets were positive and negative words that participants have to categorize as positive or negative.Results:A facilitation-inhibition indexes for positive and negative targets were calculated by subtracting the mean reaction time (RT) for valenced prime from the mean RT for neutral primes. Positive values show a facilitation effect of the valenced prime (i.e., the name of the care-recipient), and negative values inhibition. Participants were classified depending on their results of this indexes: a) positive (facilitation of positive information, inhibition of negative information), b) negative (facilitation of negative information, inhibition of positive information), c) flat (inhibition of positive and negative information), and d) ambivalence (facilitation of positive and negative information). ANOVAS were performed to explore differences between groups in emotional distress. The preliminary results showed that the ambivalence group might present more depressive symptoms compared with the positive group.Conclusion:This is the first study that analyzed implicit ambivalence in family carers of people with dementia. The preliminary results show the relevance of exploring implicit processes to explain emotional distress in this population.

A Systematic Study of Ambivalence and Well-Being in Romantic Relationships

People in close relationships can, and often do, experience ambivalence (i.e., mixed feelings) toward their romantic partner. Although ambivalence is common and consequential, research on this phenomenon is fragmented. The present work examines how four different types of ambivalence (i.e., objective, subjective, implicit-explicit, and implicit ambivalence) relate to well-being. In four intensive studies (N = 1,134) and internal meta-analyses, ambivalence was related to lower personal and relational well-being, but this association was only statistically significant for explicit (i.e., objective and subjective) types of ambivalence, with subjective ambivalence showing the strongest association, particularly for relationship outcomes. This work is the first systematic study of ambivalence and well-being in relationships and highlights the importance of capturing mixed feelings in relationship research and how such focus can benefit research on attitudinal ambivalence and well-being more broadly.

Implicit Ambivalence: A Driving Force to Improve Relationship Problems

Implicit ambivalence involves holding strong positive and negative implicit evaluations toward the same object. This state is common in close relationships because even the most satisfying partnerships involve in conflicts and other frustrating experiences that can be explained away through effortful motivated reasoning yet remain in memory as mental representations involving the partner. In fact, it appears normative for implicit measures of partner attitudes to reveal implicit ambivalence. Despite being common, however, little is known about the consequences of implicit ambivalence. The present longitudinal investigation provides initial evidence that implicit ambivalence can motivate relationship improvements. Across two studies of newlywed couples (N = 448 individuals), multilevel dyadic modeling revealed that higher implicit ambivalence was associated with higher motivation to make efforts to improve current marital problems, which predicted reduced marital-problems severity reported by the partner and increased marital satisfaction reported by both spouses 4 months later.

Unresolved Politics: Implicit Ambivalence and Political Cognition

This paper introduces a novel framework for understanding the relationship between implicit and explicit preferences and political cognition. Existing work in political psychology focuses primarily on comparing the main effects of implicit versus explicit attitude measures. This paper rethinks the role of implicit cognition by acknowledging the correspondence between implicit and explicit preferences (i.e., the distance between implicitly and explicitly measured attitudes). Data from the 2008 American National Election Study are used to examine implicit racial ambivalence, or the gap between one’s implicit and explicit racial preferences, as it exists in the United States. Results indicate implicit racial ambivalence, which has been shown to yield effortful thinking related to race, is negatively related to education and Need for Cognition, and predicts race-related policy attitudes as well as vote choice in the 2008 election. Furthermore, implicit ambivalence moderates the influence of ideology on political attitudes, including attitudes toward outcomes that are only covertly related to race and cannot be predicted directly by implicit or explicit racial attitudes alone.

Changing prejudiced attitudes, promoting egalitarianism, and enhancing diversity through fundamental processes of persuasion

ABSTRACT We review work from persuasion science relevant to reducing prejudiced attitudes. We begin by introducing the idea that the thoughts people generate – their number and valence – are critical for understanding when responding to persuasive attempts will result in egalitarian attitudes. A focus on thinking highlights the importance of understanding short and long-term attitude change in promoting diversity. How much people think is also consequential for spreading of initial change to more distal attitudes and generalization of change to other judgments. The second section describes a process of thought validation that emphasizes the importance of considering what people think and feel about their own thoughts. This meta-cognitive process is shown to make a difference in producing consequential changes in reducing prejudiced attitudes toward African Americans, immigrants, refugees, individuals with disabilities, and beyond. The conditions under which variables such as minority status and stigmatized sources affect elaboration and validation are also specified. The fourth section explores how these two processes are relevant for understanding explicit and implicit ambivalence and change in the domain of prejudiced attitudes. We highlight the utility of a process-oriented approach for designing future research and promoting more inclusive attitudes and actions.

SEX DIFFERENCES BETWEEN ATTITUDES TOWARD MEDICATIONS AND POOR ANTIHYPERTENSIVE MEDICATION ADHERENCE IN ELDERLY

Despite its importance for blood pressure control, antihypertensive medication adherence remains a challenge in older adults. Explicit and implicit attitudinal ambivalence toward medications (holding both positive and negative explicit attitudes, and discrepant explicit and implicit attitudes, respectively) may underlie low adherence. We examined whether race, age, or sex affect the associations between attitudes, ambivalence, and adherence. A questionnaire and implicit association test captured medication attitudes from hypertensive adults aged ≥55 (n=199). Adherence was measured with the Krousel-Wood Medication Adherence Scale (K-Wood-MAS-4). Higher scores on the attitudes and adherence scales indicate more positive attitudes and worse adherence, respectively. Associations and effect modification by sex, race (white vs. nonwhite), and age (<65 vs. ≥65) were tested in separate ordinary least squares regressions. The sample was 51.0% female, 43.7% nonwhite, 35.5% aged ≥65, with mean K-Wood-MAS-4 0.64 (SD=0.88). Better adherence was associated with more positive net explicit attitudes (β=-0.18, 95% CI -0.30, -0.06, p=0.003), and worse adherence with higher explicit ambivalence (β=-0.05, 95% CI 0.01, 0.09, p=0.028). The associations with explicit attitudes and explicit ambivalence were significant for men (β=-0.30, 95% CI -0.48, -0.11, p=0.002 and β=0.09, 95% CI 0.03, 0.15, p=0.005, respectively) but not for women (β=-0.07, 95% CI -0.423, 0.09, p=0.378 and β=-0.00, 95% CI -0.06, 0.05, p=0.982, respectively) (p-values for interaction=0.062 and 0.031, respectively). No race or age differences were identified. Adherence was not associated with implicit attitudes or implicit ambivalence. In conclusion, explicit attitudes and explicit attitudinal ambivalence may underlie low adherence to antihypertensive medications, particularly for older men.

Implicit ambivalence of significant others: Significant others trigger positive and negative evaluations

AbstractDespite the rich literature on implicit partner evaluations, there has been scant attention to a defining feature of significant other mental representations—their affective complexity. Recent findings (Zayas &amp; Shoda, 2015), however, provide an empirical demonstration that significant others automatically and simultaneously activate positive and negative evaluations—a phenomenon we refer to as implicit ambivalence. A primary aim of this paper is to extend extant theory by elaborating on the features of the dyadic context that may contribute to the formation of implicit ambivalence. Particularly, drawing from research from relationship science, social cognition, and social neuroscience, we focus on the ability of significant others to dynamically and simultaneously confer rewards and threats, the attunement of perceivers to potential social rewards and social threats, and aspects of sense‐making of another person's mind that may give rise to implicit ambivalence. From this new perspective, implicit ambivalence is not a pathological or rare state. Quite the opposite, implicit ambivalence may be a normative, typical process, that is triggered even by people who are highly positive in one's network. We identify future directions for social cognition and relationship science.

Persuasive message scrutiny as a function of implicit-explicit discrepancies in racial attitudes

Past research has shown that individuals low in prejudice think more carefully when information is from or about stigmatized individuals than non-stigmatized individuals. One explanation for this effect is that the heightened scrutiny stems from a motivation to guard against potential prejudice toward stigmatized others (i.e. “watchdog motivation”). The present research tested a variation of the watchdog hypothesis based on the idea of implicit ambivalence. Specifically, we argue that among individuals low in explicit (i.e., deliberative) prejudice, it is those who are also relatively high in implicit (i.e., automatic) prejudice who will do the most processing in prejudice relevant contexts. The implicit ambivalence framework also makes a novel prediction that individuals who are relatively high in explicit prejudice but low in implicit prejudice would also engage in enhanced information processing. As predicted, people with racial implicit-explicit attitude discrepancies, regardless of the direction of discrepancy, were found to engage in greater of scrutiny of a message about the hiring of Black faculty (study 1), a message about a Black job candidate (study 2), and even when the Black concept was merely primed subliminally prior to reading a race-irrelevant message (study 3).

Contaminação e Quarentena

Neste artigo, o historiador da arte Michael Asbury relaciona a questão dos novos públicos com a produção e difusão da arte em si. Dentro dessa perspectiva, ele discute como a expectativa de que a arte brasileira inevitavelmente possua uma característica híbrida leva a uma problemática e implícita ambivalência no que se refere à sua relação com as genealogias canônicas. Equiparando este caráter ambivalente do hibridismo a noções de contaminação e de quarentena, ele analisa como o discurso crítico que acompanha a arte dessa região modificou-se: de um discurso que assinalava suas estratégias identitárias para outro de distinção do cânone. Para o olhar "ocidental", portanto, parece que a noção de hibridismo age menos como uma forma de relação produtiva e mais como um significante de autenticidade. Espera-se, problematicamente, que este sentido fabricado de autenticidade conecte-se com os novos públicos para a arte. Asbury sugere, ao contrário, que será por meio do engajamento na produção, ou na auto-representação, que novos públicos para a arte deverão surgir.

A metacognitive approach to "implicit" and "explicit" evaluations: Comment on Gawronski and Bodenhausen (2006).

A metacognitive model (MCM) is presented to describe how automatic (implicit) and deliberative (explicit) measures of attitudes respond to change attempts. The model assumes that contemporary implicit measures tap quick evaluative associations, whereas explicit measures also consider the perceived validity of these associations (and other factors). Change in explicit measures is greater than implicit measures when new evaluative associations are formed and old associations are rejected. Implicit measure change is greater than explicit when newly formed evaluative associations are rejected. When implicit and explicit evaluations conflict, implicit ambivalence can occur. The authors relate the MCM to the associative-propositional evaluation model and explain how the MCM builds on the attitude strength assumptions of the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion.

The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean (review)

Reviewed by: The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean H. Adlai Murdoch The Libertine Colony: Creolization in the Early French Caribbean By Doris GarrawayDurham: Duke UP, 2005. ISBN 0-8223-3465-8 paper. xvi + 412 pp. This excellent book represents a ground-breaking work of scholarship in an essential but long-neglected area of Caribbean Studies: the genesis and construction of those early historical and ethnographic narratives, written largely by members of the clergy and the established social hierarchy from mainland France, that provided the framework for the study of the social inequities, physical brutality, and outright racism that was subsequently to characterize the French colonial encounter in the Caribbean. Doris Garraway's in-depth, stellar research and nuanced readings of these seminal (I use the word advisedly) historical texts provides a fresh and necessary perspective on colonialism's rationalization of sexual exploitation and postcolonial theory's long-criticized neglect of slavery as well as its longstanding tendency to obliterate the role of the native. Primacy is given in Garraway's analysis to what she calls "the roles of desire and sexuality in mediating colonial power relations" (24), and deservedly so. For this complex nexus was what gave rise, in its turn, to the generalized and racially driven hierarchy of domination and submission that she aptly characterizes as "libertine." Garraway explains the choice of this term for her title by drawing first [End Page 236] on the eighteenth-century definition of libertinage as "the refusal of conventional sexual morality and the unbridled pursuit of sensual pleasures" (24). This is then linked to a context of colonization and creolization by figuring the colonies as "a space of immorality, religious heresy, violence, and sexual license" (25). This framework of sexual and interracial libertinage glosses and expands upon Robert Young's theory of colonial desire, especially its twin axes of ambivalence and subversion. In illuminating the burgeoning colonial representation of white men as "the symbolic fathers of both the slaves and the free people of color" (33), Garraway posits the instantiation of an incestuous colonial family romance as the overarching symbolic and material framework of French Caribbean colonial practice. Starting from the "fictions of reciprocity" (48) that governed French-Carib relations, this discursive duality grounds even the earliest texts. Both of Jean-Baptiste Du Tertre's major Caribbean historiographies, his Histoire générale des iles de Christophe (1654) and his Histoire générale des Antilles habitées par les François (1667–71), sought to shape the power of Christianity for colonial ends, ultimately privileging commerce and conquest over "the theme of massacre and dispossession that occupies the textual unconscious of Du Tertre's history as a repressed narrative of French colonialism in the Caribbean" (57). And while Père Labat's justly famous Nouveau voyage aux isles de l'Amérique (1742) provides extended and detailed perspectives on local flora and fauna, sugar cultivation, and the social history of the developing creole society, the implicit ambivalence of its author's values is also revealed in his rationalization of the colonies as a tabula rasa inviting European transformation and mastery, and as a meritocracy rewarding hard work and fealty. But the exploitation of race and its hierarchies remain the bedrock of these slave-based communities, and even as non-European occult practices were socially stigmatized, Christian ideals of equality and justice would increasingly be seen as "inimical to the maintenance of slavery" (162). Thus the implicit racial subtext that both mediated and enabled the construction of the colonial class/caste system and the ongoing contravention of its stated sexual norms encountered its anxious object in growing fears of miscegenation and métissage. This politicization of the libidinal, as Garraway so deftly puts it, blamed the victim even as it confirmed the unspoken but longstanding predatory sexual practices of the colonizers, in that interracial libertinage now encompassed the taking of African slave women as concubines, the taking of free women of color as mistresses, and the simultaneous displacement of "responsibility for the taboo act onto slave women and persons of mixed race, thus enabling the continuance of libertinage" (197), This critical move "attributed an illicit agency to slave women" (203...

Implicit ambivalence from attitude change: An exploration of the PAST model.

Traditional models of attitude change have assumed that when people appear to have changed their attitudes in response to new information, their old attitudes disappear and no longer have any impact. The present research suggests that when attitudes change, the old attitude can remain in memory and influence subsequent behavior. Four experiments are reported in which initial attitudes were created and then changed (or not) with new information. In each study, the authors demonstrate that when people undergo attitude change, their old and new attitudes can interact to produce evaluative responses consistent with a state of implicit ambivalence. In Study 1, individuals whose attitudes changed were more neutral on a measure of automatic evaluation. In Study 2, attitude change led people to show less confidence on an implicit but not an explicit measure. In Studies 3 and 4, people whose attitudes changed engaged in greater processing of attitude-relevant information than did individuals whose attitudes were not changed.