The effects of language complexity in a counterattitudinal appeal to laypeople : an application of the elaboration likelihood model of persuasion to a legal issue

The effects of a complexly worded counterattitudinal appeal on laypeople's attitudes toward a legal issue were examined, using the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) of persuasion as a theoretical framework. This model states that persuasion can result from the elaboration and scrutiny of the message arguments (i.e., central route processing), or can result from less cognitively effortful strategies, such as relying on source characteristics as a cue to message validity (i.e., peripheral route processing). One hundred and sixty-seven undergraduates (85 men and 81 women) listened to eitller a low status or high status source deliver a counterattitudinal speech on a legal issue. The speech was designed to contain strong or weak arguments. These arguments were 'worded in a simple and, therefore, easy to comprehend manner, or in a complex and, therefore, difficult to comprehend manner. Thus, there were three experimental manipulations: argument comprehensibility (easy to comprehend vs. difficult to comprehend), argumel11 strength (weak vs. strong), and source status (low vs. high). After listening to tIle speec.J] participants completed a measure 'of their attitude toward the legal issue, a thought listil1g task, an argument recall task,manipulation checks, measures of motivation to process the message, and measures of mood. As a result of the failure of the argument strength manipulation, only the effects of the comprehel1sibility and source status manipulations were tested. There was, however, some evidence of more central route processing in the easy comprehension condition than in the difficult comprehension condition, as predicted. Significant correlations were found between attitude and favourable and unfavourable thoughts about the legal issue with easy to comprehend arguments; whereas, there was a correlation only between attitude and favourable thoughts 11 toward the issue with difficult to comprehend arguments, suggesting, perhaps, that central route processing, \vhich involves argument scrutiny and elaboration, occurred under conditions of easy comprehension to a greater extent than under conditions of difficult comprehension. The results also revealed, among other findings, several significant effects of gender. Men had more favourable attitudes toward the legal issue than did women, men recalled more arguments from the speech than did women, men were less frustrated while listening to the speech than were ,vomen, and men put more effort into thinking about the message arguments than did women. When the arguments were difficult to comprehend, men had more favourable thoughts and fewer unfavourable thoughts about the legal issue than did women. Men and women may have had different affective responses to the issue of plea bargaining (with women responding more negatively than men), especially in light of a local and controversial plea bargain that occurred around the time of this study. Such pre-existing gender differences may have led to tIle lower frustration, the greater effort, the greater recall, and more positive attitudes for men than for WOlnen. Results· from this study suggest that current cognitive models of persuasion may not be very applicable to controversial issues which elicit strong emotional responses. Finally, these data indicate that affective responses, the controversial and emotional nature ofthe issue, gender and other individual differences are important considerations when experts are attempting to persuade laypeople toward a counterattitudinal position.

Personality and neuropsychological factors involved in females' relational aggression

The personality and neuropsychological factors associated with relational aggression were examined in a group of30 grade 6,7, and 8 girls identified through cluster analysis as being highly, yet almost exclusively, relationally aggressive and a group of 30 nonaggressive matched controls. Parents of the students in both groups completed the Coolidge Personality and Neuropsychological Inventory (1998), a 200- item DSM-IV -TR aligned, parent-as-respondent, standardized measure of c.hildren' s psychological functioning. It was found that high levels of relational aggression, in the absence of physical and verbal aggression, were associated with symptoms of DSM-IV - TR Axis I oppositional defiant disorder and conduct disorder and a wide variety of personality traits associated with DSM-IV -TR Axis II paranoid, borderline, narcissistic, histrionic, schizotypal, and passive aggressive personality disorders. Implications of these findings for theory, practice, and further research are discussed.

Enabling and Measuring Complexity in Evolving Designs using Generative Representations for Artificial Architecture

As the complexity of evolutionary design problems grow, so too must the quality of solutions scale to that complexity. In this research, we develop a genetic programming system with individuals encoded as tree-based generative representations to address scalability. This system is capable of multi-objective evaluation using a ranked sum scoring strategy. We examine Hornby's features and measures of modularity, reuse and hierarchy in evolutionary design problems. Experiments are carried out, using the system to generate three-dimensional forms, and analyses of feature characteristics such as modularity, reuse and hierarchy were performed. This work expands on that of Hornby's, by examining a new and more difficult problem domain. The results from these experiments show that individuals encoded with those three features performed best overall. It is also seen, that the measures of complexity conform to the results of Hornby. Moving forward with only this best performing encoding, the system was applied to the generation of three-dimensional external building architecture. One objective considered was passive solar performance, in which the system was challenged with generating forms that optimize exposure to the Sun. The results from these and other experiments satisfied the requirements. The system was shown to scale well to the architectural problems studied.

Being Relational With Underserved Youth: A Reflective Process

When working with under-served youth, possibly the most important, yet often times the most difficult, thing for practitioners to do is to build positive, trusting, open relationships. This study aims to address this challenge. Two groups of under-served youth were examined, one being teens deemed “at-risk” and one being youth with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD). This study was novel in its approach as all efforts were made to ensure the youth's opinions on how to be relational with them were heard. Two youths with ASD were nonverbal and a special picture interview procedure was developed to allow their participation. Three thematic statements emerged from the data collected: 1. Youth need low anxiety relationships. 2. Youth need novel forms of engagement. 3. Youth need us to understand that their actions reflect their histories. The analyses that lead to these statements are described as well as the reasoning and implications of these statements.

Linking Ethical Leadership and Employees’ In-Role Performance: Exploring the Mediating Roles of Psychological Capital and Follower-Leader Relational Capital

This study investigates the mediating impact of psychological capital and follower-leader relational capital on the relationship between ethical leadership and in-role performance through the lenses of social exchange theory, social information processing theory, and psychological resources theory. Analysis of data collected from a sample of 171 employees and 24 supervisors from Pakistan reveals that ethical leadership has a positive effect on followers’ in-role job performance, yet this effect is fully explained through the role of psychological capital and partially through follower-leader relational capital. Significant implications of these findings for further research and practice are discussed.

An Abstract Algebraic Theory of L-Fuzzy Relations for Relational Databases

Classical relational databases lack proper ways to manage certain real-world situations including imprecise or uncertain data. Fuzzy databases overcome this limitation by allowing each entry in the table to be a fuzzy set where each element of the corresponding domain is assigned a membership degree from the real interval [0…1]. But this fuzzy mechanism becomes inappropriate in modelling scenarios where data might be incomparable. Therefore, we become interested in further generalization of fuzzy database into L-fuzzy database. In such a database, the characteristic function for a fuzzy set maps to an arbitrary complete Brouwerian lattice L. From the query language perspectives, the language of fuzzy database, FSQL extends the regular Structured Query Language (SQL) by adding fuzzy specific constructions. In addition to that, L-fuzzy query language LFSQL introduces appropriate linguistic operations to define and manipulate inexact data in an L-fuzzy database. This research mainly focuses on defining the semantics of LFSQL. However, it requires an abstract algebraic theory which can be used to prove all the properties of, and operations on, L-fuzzy relations. In our study, we show that the theory of arrow categories forms a suitable framework for that. Therefore, we define the semantics of LFSQL in the abstract notion of an arrow category. In addition, we implement the operations of L-fuzzy relations in Haskell and develop a parser that translates algebraic expressions into our implementation.