48 female college students, selected to be relatively high or low on Rokeach's Dogmatism scale, listened to a series of tape-recorded statements asserting opinions that were either in strong agreement, strong disagreement, or mild disagreement with attitudes common in their group. Changes in galvanic skin responses were measured for each of 12 statements, 4 items representing each agreement condition. GSRs were greater for strong disagreement than strong agreement and for strong agreement than mild disagreement. Analysis of variance of the transformed GSR scores showed significant effects of level of dogmatism and extent of disagreement.
Get full access to this article
View all access options for this article.
References
1.
CooperJ. B.Emotion in prejudice. Science, 1959, 130, 314–318.
2.
CooperJ. B.PollockD.The identification of prejudiced attitude by the galvanic skin response. J. abnorm. soc. Psychol., 1959, 50, 241–245.
3.
DobbsM. F.Relationship between dogmatism and arousal due to dissonance and consonance measured by the galvanic skin reflex. Unpublished Honors thesis, Smith College, 1964.
4.
GuttmanL.The principal components of scalable attitudes. In LazarsfeldP. F. (Ed.), Mathematical thinking in the social sciences. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1954. Ch. 3.
5.
PaintalA. S.A comparison of the galvanic skin responses of normals and psychotics. J. exp. Psychol., 1951, 41, 425–428.
6.
RokeachM.The open and closed mind. New York: Basic Books, 1960.
