Temporal distance from a catastrophic social event, e.g., the killing of President John Kennedy, might be expected to result in a de-differentiation (simplification) of the configuration of attitudes surrounding the event. In a factor-analytic sense, this would be seen through the identification of fewer attitude dimensions a year after the killing and after the original study. Present results disconfirm the simplification hypothesis, showing instead, the same attitude factors as originally identified for Ss sampled in the same four American universities. Analyses for various subgroups of undergraduates show some interpretable changes in factor-scale profiles.
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