ブックタイトル明星大学 心理学年報 第32号

概要

明星大学 心理学年報 第32号

明星大学心理学年報2014,No.32,1―18原著Development and Testing of a New Indirect AttitudeMeasure for Pictorial ObjectsMikiya HayashiMeisei UniversityMeasuring attitudes in an indirect way has become indispensable in recent social psychologicalstudies. Nevertheless, it is difficult to claim that social psychology has developed an effectiveindirect method to measure attitudes toward large pictorial attitudinal objects.The present studyproposed a new indirect method, the Serial Evaluative Conversion Task (SECT), to measureparticipants’attitudes toward various 15cm×20cm full-color pictorial objects that appeared on amonitor.Thepurposeofthepresent studywas to demonstratetheprincipleandassumedunderlyingpsychological measurement theory of the SECT. The validity and reliability of the method wasexamined in three experiments. Results showed that attitude scores obtained using the SECTsignificantly discriminated between the evaluative valence of emotionally positive, neutral, andnegative target pictures.These results indicated that the SECT at least showed minimum validity.The SECT showed veryhigh reliabilityfor an indirect attitude measure;the reliabilitycoefficient(ρ)obtained via split-half test ranged from .64 to .75.Key Words :attitude,picture,indirect measure,Serial Evaluative Conversion TaskDefined as“a psychological tendency that is expressedbyevaluating a particular entitywith somedegree of favor or disfavor”(Eagly & Chaiken,1993), attitude is one of the central concepts ofsocial psychology. Several social psychologyresearchers have attempted to measure participants’attitudestoward attitudinal objects to testtheir hypotheses. The most popular means ofmeasuring attitudes are self-report measures thatutilize Likert-type scales and semantic differentialscales. However, in self-report measures, participantsdo not alwaysreport theirattitudestruthfully,and even tend to disguise them, particularly whentheattitudinal object is related to a sociallydelicatematter. Therefore, measuring attitudes in an indirectway has become indispensable.Developed by A. G. Greenwald and colleagues(Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwarts, 1998), the com-This research was partly supported by Grants-in-Aid forYoung Scientists (B)(24730517).Correspondenceconcerning this articleshouldbeaddressedto Mikiya Hayashi, Department of Psychology, Meisei University,2-1-1, Hodokubo, Hino, Tokyo 191-8506, Japan.Contact:hayashim＠psy.meisei-u.ac.jpputer-based Implicit Association Test (IAT) is themost frequentlyused indirect attitudemeasure.TheIAT has typically been used to measure participants’relativeattitudes toward paired concepts.Ina typical IAT task, two categorical labels (e.g.,“flower”and“pleasant”) appear in the upper-leftarea ofa monitor,another two categorical labels(e.g.,“insect”and“unpleasant”) appear in the upper-right area, and exemplars (e.g.,“lily,”“mantis,”“happy,”“sad”) belonging to those four categoriesappearinthecenterofthescreenindividuallyandinrandom order. Participants judge whether eachexemplar belongs to the categorical labels on theleft or right asquicklyandpreciselyaspossible,andcommunicate their decision by pressing the left orright key. An IAT task consists of two separateblocks displaying four categorical labels;thedifferencein participants’average response latencies forthese blocks is representative of their relative attitudescorestoward thetarget categories.For example,the average response latency for a block thathas“flower/pleasant”on the left and“insect/unpleasant”onthe right tends to be shorter than theaverage response latency for a block that has