Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This research is aimed to study whether we will have the same attitude change when we have the same intensityof cognitive or emotional level for attitude. People who have higher involvement will be persuaded by central route and lowinvolvement will be persuaded by peripheral route: the matching effect in attitude change. The present study controlled theintensity of both cognitive and emotional factor and instructed participants to express their initial attitude as well as attitudechange under four experimental manipulations. Results showed that only matching effect of emotional factor was found butnot cognitive factor. A connectionist model was therefore built to simulate the processes and found that there would havedifferent thresholds for cognitive and emotional routes and the threshold of cognitive route should be higher than emotionalroute. Implications are proposed based on the behavioral and simulation investigations.