John N. Bassili

Emotion recognition: The role of facial movement and the relative importance of upper and lower areas of the face.

In order to investigate the role of facial movement in the recognition of emotions, faces were covered with black makeup and white spots. Video recordings of such faces were played back so that only the white spots were visible. The results demonstrated that moving displays of happiness, sadness, fear, surprise, anger and disgust were recognized more accurately than static displays of the white spots at the apex of the expressions. This indicated that facial motion, in the absence of information about the shape and position of facial features, is informative about these basic emotions. Normally illuminated dynamic displays of these expressions, however, were recognized more accurately than displays of moving spots. The relative effectiveness of upper and lower facial areas for the recognition of these six emotions was also investigated using normally illuminated and spots-only displays. In both instances the results indicated that different facial regions are more informative for different emitions. The movement patterns characterizing the various emotional expressions as well as common confusions between emotions are also discussed.

Meta-judgmental versus operative indexes of psychological attributes : The case of measures of attitude strength

Meta-attitudes are impressions of properties of ones attitudes. This article distinguishes between meta-attitudinal indexes of attitude strength and operative indexes that are derived from the judgment process or its outcomes. Measures of both types were tested against criteria of attitude pliability and stability. The results revealed that the meta-attitudinal and operative measures formed distinct clusters and that the operative index accounted for unique variance in the criteria, whereas the meta-attitudinal one did not. The author argues that operative measures of strength provide a relatively nonreactive means of assessing properties of strength that can be unconscious, whereas meta-attitudinal measures are particularly susceptible to extraneous influences that can undermine their validity. The one advantage of meta-attitudinal measures is their semantic specificity.

Response Latency and the Accessibility of Voting Intentions: What Contributes to Accessibility and How it Affects Vote Choice

Response latencies to all questions in a computer-assisted telephone interviewing (CATI) survey of the 1990 Ontario election were recorded. Prior to the election, a random sample of respondents were asked about their voting intention, their leader preference, their party preference, and their customary party identification. After the election, respondents were called back to determine if they had voted and, if so, for what party. Models of vote choice demonstrated that the voting behavior of respondents who expressed their voting intention quickly in the preelection interview was much more predictable than the voting behavior of respondents who expressed their voting intention slowly. The accessibility of voting intentions was, in turn, related to conflict among determinants of vote choice. Moreover the accessibility of voting intentions was related to the accessibility of party identification, but only for respondents who did not experience a conflict in the election.

Auditory and visual word-stem completion: Separating data-driven and conceptually driven processes

Two experiments investigated the contributions of data-driven and conceptually driven processing on an implicit word-stem completion task. In Experiment 1, individual words were studied either visually or auditorily and were tested using either visual or auditory word-stems. Keeping modality the same from study to test led to more priming than did changing modality, but there was reliable cross-modal priming. In Experiment 2, subjects read sentences like The boat travelled underwater and inferred the subject noun (i.e. “submarine”) or sentences like The submarine travelled underwater and categorized the subject noun (i.e. “boat”). At test, there was reliable priming for both actually read nouns and inferred nouns. In addition, a modality effect was evident for the actually read nouns but not for the inferred nouns. Taken together, these results imply that there is a basic conceptually driven contribution to priming plus an additional contribution of data-driven processing when surface form is the same at study and test.

The minority slowness effect: subtle inhibitions in the expression of views not shared by others.

Five studies revealed that people who hold the minority opinion express that opinion less quickly than people who hold the majority opinion. The difference in speed in the expression of the minority and majority opinions grew as the difference in the size of the minority and majority grew. Also, those with the minority view were particularly slow when they assumed the majority to be large, whereas the opposite was true for those with the majority view. The minority slowness effect was not found to be linked to attitude strength, nor was it influenced by anticipated public disclosure of the attitude. The effect is discussed in the context of implicit conformity pressures and the limited buffering effect of false consensus assumptions.

Do Strength‐Related Attitude Properties Determine Susceptibility to Response Effects? New Evidence From Response Latency, Attitude Extremity, and Aggregate Indices

A great deal of research has shown that small changes in question wording, format, orordering can sometimes substantially alter peoples reports of their attitudes. Althoughmany scholars have presumed that these so-called response effects are likely to be morepronounced when the attitudes being measured are weak, a number of studies have disconfirmedthis notion. This paper presents several new tests of this hypothesis using a variety of measuresand analytic techniques. The findings largely replicated previously documented effects andnon-effects but also uncovered new effects not previously tested. No single strength-relatedattitude attribute emerged as a consistent moderator of all response effects. Rather, differentindividual attributes moderated different effects, and a conglomeration of strength-relateddimensions did not emerge as a reliable moderator. Taken together, these results support theconclusions that different response effects occur as the result of different cognitive processes,and that various strength-related attitude attributes reflect distinct latent constructs rather than asingle one.

Procedural Efficiency and the Spontaneity of Trait Inference

This experiment examined the effect of practice with behavior-to-trait judgments on spontaneous trait inference. Subjects engaged in two tasks that were presented to them as separate experiments. The first task required subjects to make 200 yes/no judgments involving either behavior-trait inferences or behavior-object inferences. In the second task, subjects were asked to memorize 18 sentences that implied traits. The recall of half the sentences was then cued by the implied traits to assess whether the traits had been inferred spontaneously at encoding. Subjects who had practiced behavior-trait inferences were more likely to make spontaneous trait inferences than subjects who had practiced behavior-object inferences. Spontaneous trait inference was particularly likely following practice with different behaviors and the same trait. These results show that practice with trait inferences contributes to the spontaneity of these inferences.

On the psychological reality of party identification: Evidence from the accessibility of voting intentions and of partisan feelings

Results from a CATI survey of the 1993 Canadian federal election are presented. Response latencies to a voting intention question and a party identification question were obtained to measure the accessibility of these constructs among three groups of respondents: unconflicted partisans, who identified with a party and intended to vote for that party; conflicted partisans, who identified with a party but intended to vote for a different party; and nonpartisans. The voting intentions of unconflicted partisans and nonpartisans were expressed faster after the call of the election than before the election was called whereas those of conflicted partisans were expressed more slowly. Similarly, the party identification of unconflicted partisans was expressed faster after the call of the election whereas that of conflicted partisans was expressed more slowly. The implications of these and related results for the debate between proponents of the classical and revisionist views of party identification are discussed.

On the Relationship between Attitudes and Values: Exploring the Moderating Effects of Self-Monitoring and Self-Monitoring Schematicity

The moderating effect of self-monitoring on the relation between values and attitudes, and the extent to which self-monitoring schematicity accentuates this relationship were examined in a computer-assisted telephone interview (CATJ) survey. Subjects were polled on two policy issues, on their endorsement of values related to these issues, and on their self-monitoring tendencies. Response latency to the self-monitoring questions formed the self-monitoring schematicity index. Values predicted attitudes to a greater extent for low than for high self-monitors. Moreover, individuals who quickly answered questions about their self-monitoring tendencies (schematic low and high self-monitors) behaved more consistently with the tenets of the construct than individuals who answered the questions slowly. The implications of these results for theorizing about the influence of values on attitudes and for the role of schematicity in self-assessment in the personality domain are discussed.

On the Representation of Strong and Weak Attitudes About Policy in Memory

A priming paradigm was used to explore the representation of attitudes about government policies in memory. Participants performed pairs of tasks in quick succession. The focal tasks involved evaluating a policy or thinking of one of its consequences. The results showed that thinking of a consequence of a policy speeded up its subsequent evaluation, regardless of whether the participant held a strong or weak attitude about the policy. Evaluating the policy speeded up thinking of one of its consequences for strong attitudes but not for weak ones. In general, it took participants longer to think of a consequence of a policy than to evaluate it. The implications of these results for existing views of the representation of attitudes in memory are discussed.