Much of the research dealing with the relationship between candidate images and candidate preferences has attempted to assess dimensions of the candidate's image that are relatively "personal"in nature. By and large, most of this research focuses on static traits-for example, aspects of the candidate's persona relating to such dimensions as warmth, attractiveness, or dynamism. In contrast, the current study attempts to assess the degree to which candidate preferences are significantly associated with observable behavior. This was done by asking respondents to evaluate RonaldReagan and Walter Mondale with an instrument normally used to assess elements of interpersonal communication. It was found that communication behavior ratings of Reagan and Mondale signijicantly predicted differential preferences for these candidates, even after controlling for the respondents' political orientations.
Recent accounts of male and female personality development suggest that members of each sex difler in the orientations and capacities they bring to their experience of the political world. This article explores the relative importance of respondents' images of the candidates and respondents'political positions to predictions of males'and females' candidate preferences. It was predicted that candidate images bused on interpersonal communication behavior, as opposed to respondents'political positions, would be a more powerful predictor offemales'candidate preferences. The opposite pattern was expected to be thecase for rnales'candidate preferences. These predictions weresupported; however, the data analysis also indicated that both candidate images and political positions contributed significantly to predictions offemales'candidate preferences.
This article is a critical analysis of three issues that are central to the study of children's attention patterns to television. These issues are: (1) the meaning of the term “attention”; (2) the various types of stimulus attributes subsumed under the term “television”; and (3) the implications the child's level of intellectual development may have for the way he or she attends to the screen. Analysis of these issues yielded some of the following implications for TV attention research: (1) Differences in children's information processing abilities may not necessarily predict differences in children's attention patterns, because only certain conditions appear to be optimal for attention patterns to differ as a function of the child's level of intellectual development. (2) The term “television” subsumes a wide array of program variables, both with respect to form and content. Form variables are typically used to predict changes in children's attention behavior, whereas content variables are typically used to predict changes in children's social behavior. It is conceivable, however, that form variables might account for changes in children's attention behavior. The failure to make these linkages reflects a limitation of the current state of theory concerning the effects of television on children's behavior.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.