Although many attempts to change health behaviour fail, some individuals do show successful behaviour change. This study assessed the role of behavioural intentions, motivations and attitudes to the target in explaining successful changes in diet with a particular focus on positive and negative intentions and positive and negative attitudes. Participants (n=282) completed a questionnaire descri...

Three studies investigated the impact of temporal perspective on people's dominant social goals and explored the implications of these goals for openness to attitude change. Participants who perceived time as limited expressed social preferences in accordance with emotion-regulation goals (Study 1), were more prone to modify their attitude to bring it into line with the attitude of an anticipat...

College students were told they were to write an essay supporting 1 or the other side on each of S issues, and were led to believe they might be able to influence the decision about which side of an attiudinal issue they were to support. In all cases they were then told to support the side (either pro or con) they initially preferred, and postmeasures were then obtained before the actual writin...

One-hundred twenty-eight subjects (64 female, 64 male) viewed either a babyfaced or maturefaced female speaker delivering a persuasive communication, and also received information designed to make the speaker seem either untrustworthy or inexpert. Subjects indicated how much they agreed with the speaker's position and completed other measures concerning her appearance and their perceptions of h...

One of the most widely held generalizabons m social psychology IS that the efiEectiveness of a persuasive communication IS mcreased if its source is "credible " The early research by Hovland and Weiss (1951) and by Kelman and Hovland (1953) which gave substance to this conclusion has recently been extended to demonsbate the efficacy of credible communicators even when the amount of change advoc...