No abstract

The psychotherapeutic process has long been considered a context for persuasion. The Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion provides an integrative framework from which to examine the process of persuasion in psychotherapy. Various source, message, recipient, and context factors interact in a complex manner to produce attitude change. Two routes to persuasion are presented and their relevance for psychotherapy are discussed. The central route requires more effort and more active cognitive processing on the part of the client, resulting in relatively permanent attitudes that are predictive of subsequent behavior. The peripheral route requires minimal cognitive effort, relying on cues in the situation or rather simple decision rules. Attitudes resulting from this route are relatively temporary and are not predictive of subsequent behavior. Both routes to persuasion are characteristic of the psychotherapeutic process. The role of affect in information processing and methods for encouraging central route processing are discussed.

College-age and elderly subjects were required to give verbal mediators for consonant-vowelconsonant (CVC) pairs varying in associability level, where associability was defined as the scaled likelihood of a CVC pair's yielding a verbal mediator. The complexity of each elaboration of each of the components of the pairs was then determined to investigate potential differences in mediator formation between the two groups of subjects. In agreement with previous findings, the younger subjects tended to elaborate the stimulus term more than the response term. However, the elderly subjects elaborated the response term significantly more, and there was a trend for this to occur more with low-associability pairs.

No abstract