Ambivalence is defined as the coexistence of opposed emotional attitudes toward a significant figure in the social environment. A new technique for the assessment of ambivalence is described; its application in a series of studies on college students, hospitalized schizophrenics, and school children reviewed. The obtained relationships of ambivalence to sociocultural characteristics, perceived ...

The subjective experience of ambivalence results from possessing both positive and negative reactions. Why do individuals sometimes experience ambivalence when they possess only positive or only negative reactions (i.e., univalent attitudes)? This research advances and provides support for the notion that anticipated conflicting reactions underlie such ambivalence. Anticipated conflicting react...

Ambivalence and the experience of China-educated nurses working in Australia The last decade has seen an increase in research on the experience of immigrant nurses. There are two prevailing approaches in this body of work. One is a focus on the positive or negative aspects of the experience, and the other, a depiction of the experience as a linear movement from struggle to a comfortable state. ...

CONTEXT Pregnancy ambivalence, or conflicted desire about having a baby, has been associated with decreased contraceptive use and unintended pregnancy. However, prior studies have neither included men nor focused on young adults, even though people in their 20s have the highest rates of unintended pregnancy. METHODS Nationally representative data from 2008-2009 were used to examine pregnancy ...

Three studies offer novel evidence addressing the consequences of explicit–implicit sexual orientation (SO) ambivalence. In Study 1, self-identified straight females completed explicit and implicit measures of SO. The results revealed that participants with greater SO ambivalence took longer responding to explicit questions about their sexual preferences, an effect moderated by the direction of...

BACKGROUND Ambivalence and anhedonia have long been identified as schizophrenic symptoms. However, ambivalence has rarely been studied, and in most evocative studies, schizophrenia participants are not anhedonic. Affective neurosciences posit two evaluative systems (one for Positivity and one for Negativity), the coactivation of which produces ambivalence, and point to two asymmetries in affect...

Many cigarette smokers appear to experience ambivalence about smoking, defined as the simultaneous co-occurrence of a strong desire to smoke and a strong wish to quit smoking. Research suggests that this ambivalence about smoking affects how smokers respond to cigarette-related stimuli, but many important questions remain about precisely how smoking ambivalence influences cognitive and affectiv...

BACKGROUND Recent work on cognitive-behavioural models of obsessive-compulsive disorder has focused on the roles played by various aspects of self-perception. In particular, moral self-ambivalence has been found to be associated with obsessive-compulsive phenomena. AIMS In this study we used an experimental task to investigate whether artificially priming moral self-ambivalence would increase...

OBJECTIVE The present study evaluates a questionnaire on ambivalence over emotional expressiveness, the AEQ-G18 [1], [2], with regard to its statistical parameters, the influence of socio-demographic variables, and its interrelationship with depression and quality of life. METHODS A representative German sample (1009 participants from East Germany and 1034 participants from West Germany) comp...

Moral decisions and social relationships are often characterized by strong feelings of ambivalence which can be a catalyst for emotional distress and several health-related problems. The anterior cingulate cortex (ACC) has been identified as a key brain region in monitoring conflicting information, but the neurobiological substrates of ambivalence processing are still widely unknown. We have co...