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The authors examined changing attitudes about filial piety, or xiao, using data from intensive interviews with 20 elderly residents, 14 family members, and 9 staff members in Nanjing, China. The findings reveal that respondents interpreted the notion of xiao in terms of their own social worlds and on the basis of their own social locations and contexts. The increasing unavailability of adult children, various benefits of institutional care, and children's financial assistance for older parents are major explanations for xiao behaviors, even when elders are placed in institutions. The high cost of professional care in institutions is contributing to a shift in attitudes about institutional elder care from stigma to privilege. The authors argue that China can expect an increasing need and demand for elder care institutions as a large number of Chinese baby boomers retire. Keywords: aging; elder care; institutions; filial piety; China

A brief summary regarding the representations of attitudes and how they have a profound impact on what we think about attitudes, attitude change, and the attitude-behavior relationship is illustrated. This review of attitude is made by analyzing the model of attribute representation in a distributed and connectionist memory system.

An argument on choosing an object can be sufficient to create an association between the chosen object and the self and self-evaluation may associatively transfer to the chosen object is described. It was concluded that post-decisional attitude changes might result from low-level associative processes that do not need higher-order propositional processes.

There is considerable controversy about how to conceptualize implicit and explicit attitudes, reflecting substantial speculation about the mechanisms involved in implicit and explicit attitude formation and change. To investigate this issue, the current work examines the processes by which new attitudes are formed and changed and how these attitudes predict behavior. Five experiments support a systems of reasoning approach to implicit and explicit attitude change. Specifically, explicit attitudes were shaped in a manner consistent with fast-changing processes, were affected by explicit processing goals, and uniquely predicted more deliberate behavioral intentions. Conversely, implicit attitudes reflected an associative system characterized by a slower process of repeated pairings between an attitude object and related evaluations, were unaffected by explicit processing goals, uniquely predicted spontaneous behaviors, and were exclusively affected by associative information about the attitude object that was not available for higher order cognition. Keywords: implicit attitudes, explicit attitudes, attitude change

A study conducted on rats tried to find whether their response to 32 percent sucrose would increase, if a 1 percent reinforcement of liquid-sucrose was provided. The results indicated that the change in behavior is related to the reward gained by the subject and not the type of behavior or the frequency of the available substances.

In contrast with traditional, direct techniques of persuasion (advertising, political rhetoric, etc.), self-persuasion is indirect and entails placing people in situations where they are motivated to persuade themselves to change their own attitudes or behavior. We find that where important attitudes, behavior, or lifestyle changes are concerned, self-persuasion strategies produce more powerful and more long-lasting effects than do direct techniques of persuasion. This is primarily due to the fact that in direct persuasion, members of an audience are constantly aware of the fact that someone is trying (or has tried) to influence them. In a self-persuasion situation, people are convinced that the motivation for change comes from within. In the present address, the author reviews a range of his research on self-persuasion and underscores its relevance to current societal problems.

The social climate for women has changed considerably since the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972a) was developed in the early 1970s, but the pattern of change in AWS scores throughout the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s is unclear. Published reports of data from 71 samples of American undergraduates responding to the AWS were located and analyzed for differences across time (1970-1995) and region (South and non-South). Women's AWS scores were strongly correlated with year of scale administration (r = .78, p < .001), and men's scores showed a similar trend toward more liberal/ feminist attitudes (r = .60, p < .001). Scores show a steady trend toward more liberal/feminist attitudes, with no appreciable reversal or slowdown during the 1980s. Gender differences steadily increased from 1970 to 1985 and decreased from 1986 to 1995. Southern samples were marginally more conservative/traditional. The results are discussed in terms of generational differences, the effects of maternal employment on attitudes, and the individual's experience of cultural change.

To determine cohort changes in gender-role attitudes, responses to the 15-item form of the Attitudes Toward Women Scale (AWS; Spence & Helmreich, 1972a, 1978) were compared for students at the same university tested in 1972, 1976, 1980, and 1992. In both males and females, members of the 1992 cohort were the most egalitarian, and members of the 1972 cohort were the least egalitarian. In all groups, women were significantly less traditional in their attitudes than men. As has been found in previous studies, detailed analyses of the data from the 1992 cohort revealed that the scale was unifactorial, but that the score distributions were skewed. There was also some indication of ceiling effects at the egalitarian end of the scale, particularly in women. The implications of these latter results for the usefulness of the AWS in current research were explored.

Astudy of attitude accessibility as a predictor of resistance towards change reveals that attitude accessibility prevents attitude change due to analytical reasoning. The study of people's attitudes towards Ronald Reagan, monitored two weeks apart, suggest that people with accessible attitude have a lower chance of attitude changes due to transient salient thoughts about the attitude object.

This article utilizes three areas of knowledge derived from field theory to conceptualize and analyze the planning and conduct of conflict management workshops for Arab and Jewish youth in Israel. The three areas of knowledge are ethnic identity and majority-minority relations, a theory of individual change within a social group, and principles of action research. The central field-theoretical concepts in each of these areas were applied to contemporary conflict management workshops. Among the products of this action research were changes in participants' attitudes, development of methods for the training and support of trainers, and accumulated knowledge regarding the differences between the two ethnic groups in communication and interpersonal styles.

On the basis of the elaboration likelihood model and self-awareness theory, it was reasoned that self-awareness should stimulate thoughtful resistance to attacks on personally important attitudes. In Experiment 1, mirror-induced self-awareness increased resistance to a message that was counterattitudinal, personally important, and based on direct experience, but it failed to increase resistance to a message that lacked those qualities. In Experiment 2, self-aware subjects showed greater resistance to weak persuasive arguments than to strong arguments, unlike subjects who were not made self-aware. These results support the view of self-awareness as a cause of biased central route processing and (hence) of selective, judicious resistance to persuasion.

The accessibility of a source's likability from memory was hypothesized to moderate the influence of source likability on persuasion. The accessibility of subjects' liking for the source of a message was manipulated in two experiments. Subjects with more accessible liking for the source exhibited more attitude change in the direction of the source's message than subjects with less accessible evaluations of the source.

This study examined whether messages using or not using emotionally intense language combined with certain colors, i.e., red, white, or blue, to effect attitude change. Emotionally intense messages were more positively associated with attitude change than were those with low emotional intensity, but no interaction effects or main effects for color were found.

New means of increasing elaboration of persuasive messages are examined. Findings suggested that participants in the experiment were more influenced by the quality of arguments in messages that matched the primed constructs.

This article explores the relation of age to manifestations and antecedents of attitude strength. Three studies demonstrate that susceptibility to attitude change is greater during early and late adulthood than during middle adulthood. Three additional studies demonstrate that attitude importance, certainty, and perceived quantity of attitude-relevant knowledge are greater in middle adulthood than during early or late adulthood. These antecedents may therefore explain life cycle shifts in susceptibility to change. Susceptibility to change, importance, certainty, and perceived knowledge differ from one another in terms of their correlations with education, gender, and race, challenging the notion that attitude strength is a unitary construct. Evidence that people incorrectly believe that susceptibility to change declines steadily over the life course reinforces the distinction between operative and meta-attitudinal measures of attitude strength.