Although my brain says I hate you, I will say I like you: Misreporting negative attitudes using idiosyncratic stimuli in a P300 paradigm
Abstract
The objective of this experiment was to explore whether the P300 of the event-related brain potential can distinguish attitudes toward people even when they are misreporting attitudes. For each participant, the experimenters selected an idiosyncratic set of people toward which participants had positive, neutral, and negative attitudes. Participants viewed sequences of stimuli with ½ having names of people and the other ½ having pictures. Participants either: (1) accurately reported all attitudes to both picture and name stimuli; (2) misreported negative attitudes as positive to pictures and accurately reported all other attitudes; or (3) misreported negative attitudes as positive to names and accurately reported all other attitudes. Consistent with previous research, results revealed stimuli that are evaluatively inconsistent with the proceeding context (e.g., negative proceeded by sequence of positives) evoked a larger amplitude P300 than stimuli that are evaluatively consistent with the proceeding context (e.g., positive proceeded by sequence of positives). This did not occur for evaluatively inconsistent neutral stimuli in a positive context, which differed from previous research and may be due to complexity of the attitude stimuli. The findings also revealed this P300 amplitude difference between inconsistent negative and consistent positive stimuli was significant when people misreport attitudes toward names and marginally significant when people misreport attitude toward pictures. Theoretical and practical implications for these results are discussed.
Subject Area
Psychology|Experiments
Recommended Citation
Mojica, Andrew Joseph, "Although my brain says I hate you, I will say I like you: Misreporting negative attitudes using idiosyncratic stimuli in a P300 paradigm" (2007). ETD Collection for University of Texas, El Paso. AAI1444120.
https://scholarworks.utep.edu/dissertations/AAI1444120