The quality of the mother-child relationship during collaborative problem solving /

The quality of the mother-child relationship was examined in relation to joint planning, maternal teaching strategies, maternal emotional support, mutual positive affect and attachment security. Fifty-five grade five children and their mothers participated in a laboratory session comprised of various activities and completed questionnaires to evaluate attachment security. Joint planning and social problem solving were assessed observationally during an origami task. Problem solving effectiveness was unrelated to maternal teaching strategies, maternal encouragement and mutual positive affect. A marginally significant relationship was found between maternal encouragement and active child participation. Attachment security was found to be significantly related to sharing of responsibility during local planning, but only for child autonomous performance. An examination of conditional probabilities revealed that mutual positive affect did not increase the likelihood of subsequent mother-child dyadic regulation. However, mutual positive affect was found to be significantly related to both active child participation and dyadic regulation. The hypothesis predicting a mediational model was not supported. The implications of these findings in the theoretical and empirical literature were considered and suggestions for future research were made.

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.