Inoculation and Mental Processing: The Instrumental Role of Associative Networks in the Process of Resistance to Counterattitudinal Influence

A Portrait of Food and Drink in Commercial TV Series

“…These "safe food" messages might be thought of as "inoculators" to be used by viewers to offset the bombardment of OFFS and alcohol appearances in shows and in commercials. Pfau et al (2005) point out that many of us may be ill prepared with counterarguments, in the face of messages that consistently advocate (by word or behavior) in one direction. This is likely to be especially true for young viewers.…”

The Influence of Television News Depictions of the Images of War on Viewers

“…First, the success of past inoculation studies, albeit mostly designed to preempt the influence of verbal counterarguments, suggests that the threat component of inoculation treatments confers a broad blanket of protection, conferring resistance to the specific content preempted in treatments and to counterarguments not covered in treatments (Pfau, 1997). This has been confirmed in a number of studies demonstrating comparable effectiveness for refutational same inoculation treatments, which preempt specific content raised in subsequent counterattitudinal attacks, and refutational different treatments, which are generic in nature (McGuire, 1961b(McGuire, , 1962(McGuire, , 1966Pfau, 1992;Pfau & Burgoon, 1988;Pfau, Kenski, Nitz & Sorenson, 1990;Pfau et al, 1997Pfau et al, , 2001Pfau et al, , 2003Pfau et al, , 2004Pfau et al, , 2005. Second, recent inoculation research has employed generic treatments.…”

The Attitude Base as a Moderator of the Effectiveness of Inoculation Strategy

“…resistance to persuasion. Over the years, additional mechanisms, such as involvement (Pfau, 1997;Pfau et al, 2004), attitude accessibility and certainty (Pfau et al, 2003), communication modality (Pfau et al, 2000), source credibility , selfefficacy (Pfau et al, 2001), and associative networks (Pfau et al, 2005) have been added to the theoretical explanation of how inoculation fosters resistance to persuasive messages.…”

“…Threat was assessed during Phase 2 after the introduction of the refutational message, in order to discover whether the threatening component placed in the refutational messages was successful in causing the participants to rethink their positions on the attitude object. The scale items used in this investigation have been successfully used in numerous inoculation studies (Pfau, 1992;Pfau & Burgoon, 1988;Pfau et al, 2005;Pfau, Kenski, Nitz, & Sorenson, 1990;Pfau, van Bockern, & Kang, 1992) and include the following bipolar adjectives: nonthreatening/threatening, not harmful/harmful, not dangerous/dangerous, not risky/risky, calm/anxious, and not scary/scary. The level of reliability generated in the current study by this scale was Cronbach's a0.94.…”

“…The theory indicates that once the attitudes of individuals are threatened, they will be motivated to bolster their arguments to effectively counterargue any possible counterattitudinal messages. To assess the level of counterarguing output, this investigation relied on the recognition check-off procedure devised by Miller and Baron (1973) and used with success in previous inoculation studies (Pfau et al, 2004(Pfau et al, , 2005(Pfau et al, , 2006.…”