Influences of the Matching Effects of Cognitive and Emotional Factors on Attitude Change

This research is aimed to study whether we will have the same attitude change when we have the same intensity of cognitive or emotional level for attitude. People who have higher involvement will be persuaded by central route and low involvement will be persuaded by peripheral route: the matching effect in attitude change. The present study controlled the intensity of both cognitive and emotional factor and instructed participants to express their initial attitude as well as attitude change under four experimental manipulations. Results showed that only matching effect of emotional factor was found but not cognitive factor. A connectionist model was therefore built to simulate the processes and found that there would have different thresholds for cognitive and emotional routes and the threshold of cognitive route should be higher than emotional route. Implications are proposed based on the behavioral and simulation investigations.