This research examined the processes by which explicit and implicit attitudes changed to systematically differing levels of counterattitudinal (CA) information. Explicit attitudes changed quickly in response to relatively small amounts of CA information, reflecting rule-based reasoning. On the other hand, implicit attitudes changed more slowly in the face of CA information, reflecting the progressive accretion of evaluation-attitude object pairings. Thus, explicit attitudes were extremely malleable and changed quickly when CA information was presented, however, implicit attitudes revealed a slow, linear change trajectory resulting from the on-going accrual of information about the attitude object. Implications for the processes underlying implicit and explicit attitudes are discussed. Copyright # 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.Understanding how people respond to counterattitudinal (CA) information has a long tradition in social psychological research on attitude change (e.g., Petty & Wegener, 1998), prejudice reduction (e.g., Dovidio, Kawakami, & Gaernter, 2000), and person memory (e.g., Srull & Wyer, 1989). Although many established models account for how people respond to CA information (i.e., information inconsistent with the valence of the initial information about a target), most of this research is based on participants' explicit, controllable reports of their attitudes. However, recent attitudes work has made a distinction between implicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes for which people do not initially have conscious access and for which activation cannot be controlled) and explicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes that people can report and for which expression can be consciously controlled). Additionally, a great deal of

The authors explored how social group cues (e.g., obesity, physical attractiveness) strongly associated with valence affect the formation of attitudes toward individuals. Although explicit attitude formation has been examined in much past research (e.g., S. T. Fiske & S. L. Neuberg, 1990), in the current work, the authors considered how implicit as well as explicit attitudes toward individuals are influenced by these cues. On the basis of a systems of evaluation perspective (e.g., R. J. Rydell & A. R. McConnell, 2006; R. J. Rydell, A. R. McConnell, D. M. Mackie, & L. M. Strain, 2006), the authors anticipated and found that social group cues had a strong impact on implicit attitude formation in all cases and on explicit attitude formation when behavioral information about the target was ambiguous. These findings obtained for cues related to obesity (Experiments 1 and 4) and physical attractiveness (Experiment 2). In Experiment 3, parallel findings were observed for race, and participants holding greater implicit racial prejudice against African Americans formed more negative implicit attitudes toward a novel African American target person than did participants with less implicit racial prejudice. Implications for research on attitudes, impression formation, and stigma are discussed.

ABSTRACT-Because different processes underlie implicit and explicit attitudes, we hypothesized that they are differentially sensitive to different kinds of information. We measured implicit and explicit attitudes over time, as different types of attitude-relevant information about a single attitude object were presented. As expected, explicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of consciously accessible, verbally presented behavioral information about the target. In contrast, implicit attitudes formed and changed in response to the valence of subliminally presented primes, reflecting the progressive accretion of attitude object-evaluation pairings. As a consequence, when subliminal primes and behavioral information were of opposite valence, people formed implicit and explicit attitudes of conflicting valence.Consider the following scenario. A woman talks to a man at a singles mixer. He seems to be a perfectly pleasant conversationalist, assertive without being pushy. When asked later what she thinks of him, her first inclination is to say, ''Nice guy.'' Yet a friend points out that she seemed inattentive to his approaches and disgusted by his presence, perhaps because he is similar to an ex-lover with whom things ended badly.Who has not had a similar experience of conscious reactions that contrast with unconscious ones? Social psychologists have recently begun to explain such apparently different reactions as reflecting distinct processes of evaluation that may occur simultaneously (Fazio & Olson, 2003;Smith & DeCoster, 2000;Wilson, Lindsey, & Schooler, 2000). Implicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes to which people do not initially have conscious access and whose activation cannot be controlled) can be distinguished from explicit attitudes (i.e., attitudes that people can report and whose expression can be consciously controlled). These distinct types of evaluation are thought to reflect two very different systems by which information is processed (Sloman, 1996;Smith & DeCoster, 2000), and this distinction has been applied to many important areas of psychology (Chaiken & Trope, 1999).Sloman (1996) argued that there are two independent systems of reasoning that differ both in what information they process and how they process it (see also McClelland, McNaughton, & O'Reilly, 1995). The first system of reasoning, the slow-learning system, operates using interconnected associations in memory that are based on similarity and contiguity. In this case, learning consists of associations in memory, which are formed and strengthened by the slow accrual of information over time. The second system of reasoning, the fast-learning system, relies on logic and symbolic representations at a relatively higher-order level of cognitive processing. Sloman's approach is congruent with current conceptualizations of how implicit and explicit attitudes operate (Gawronski, Strack, & Bodenhausen, in press). The slow-learning system of reasoning is relevant to understanding of how implicit attitudes form and function becau...

This article examines the spillover amplification hypothesis, which proposes that because people lower in self-complexity experience stronger responses to life events they will show relatively better well-being in the presence of positive factors (e.g., better social support) and relatively poorer well-being in the presence of negative factors (e.g., a history of negative experiences). Across three studies, support for spillover amplification was found. Specifically, people lower in self-complexity revealed greater self-esteem, less depression, and fewer illnesses when they had greater social support (Study 1) and more desirable personality characteristics (Study 2), yet they had poorer well-being if they had a history of many negative life events (Study 3). Thus, how one's self-concept is represented in memory moderates the relationship between many well-established factors and well-being.

This experiment investigated how prior beliefs affect young and older adults' ability to detect differences in objective contingency. Participants received new evidence that the objective contingency between two events was positive, negative, or zero when they believed that there was a positive or negative relationship between events, when they believed that the events were unrelated, and when they had no knowledge of the relationship between the events. They were then asked to estimate the objective contingency and recall the contingency evidence. Beliefs that events were or could be related improved young adults' contingency discrimination. Moreover, these beliefs did not produce biases in young adults' memory for the contingency evidence, but rather affected how they weighted this evidence at judgment. In contrast, these same beliefs did not improve older adults' contingency discrimination, but did produce biases in their memory for the evidence that were similar to those seen in their judgment. These findings are discussed in terms of age-related changes in working memory executive processes that impair older adults' ability to fully evaluate both belief-confirming and disconfirming contingency evidence and update their beliefs with this information.