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AFFIRMATION AND DENIAL IN EVALUATIVE DESCRIPTIONS
Author(s) -
EISER J. RICHARD,
WHITE CAMILLA J. MOWER
Publication year - 1973
Publication title -
british journal of psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.536
H-Index - 92
eISSN - 2044-8295
pISSN - 0007-1269
DOI - 10.1111/j.2044-8295.1973.tb01366.x
Subject(s) - psychology , denial , social psychology , subject (documents) , nonsense , linguistics , psychoanalysis , biochemistry , chemistry , philosophy , library science , computer science , gene
Children made a series of evaluative judgements of 20 nonsense words, which they were told to imagine were people's names. Each subject judged half the names in terms of two‐category rating scales containing an affirmative (A) response category which was evaluatively positive (E +) and a negative (n) category which was evaluatively negative (E ‐), e.g. ‘happy‐not happy’, the other half were judged in terms of scales where the A category was E ‐, and the N category E +, e.g. ‘rude ‐ not rude’. The main finding was a highly significant tendency for subjects to give more A than N responses, irrespective of evaluative content: in addition, a tendency for subjects to give more E ‐ than E + responses, irrespective of grammatical form, approached significance.