Neural dissociations in attitude strength: Distinct regions of cingulate cortex track ambivalence and certainty.

Abstract

People's behaviors are often guided by valenced responses to objects in the environment. Beyond positive and negative evaluations, attitudes research has documented the importance of attitude strength--qualities of an attitude that enhance or attenuate its impact and durability. Although neuroscience research has extensively investigated valence, little work exists on other related variables like metacognitive judgments about one's attitudes. It remains unclear, then, whether the various indicators of attitude strength represent a single underlying neural process or whether they reflect independent processes. To examine this, we used functional MRI (fMRI) to identify the neural correlates of attitude strength. Specifically, we focus on ambivalence and certainty, which represent metacognitive judgments that people can make about their evaluations. Although often correlated, prior neuroscience research suggests that these 2 attributes may have distinct neural underpinnings. We investigate this by having participants make evaluative judgments of visually presented words while undergoing fMRI. After scanning, participants rated the degree of ambivalence and certainty they felt regarding their attitudes toward each word. We found that these 2 judgments corresponded to distinct brain regions' activity during the process of evaluation. Ambivalence corresponded to activation in anterior cingulate cortex, dorsomedial prefrontal cortex, and posterior cingulate cortex. Certainty, however, corresponded to activation in unique areas of the precuneus/posterior cingulate cortex. These results support a model treating ambivalence and certainty as distinct, though related, attitude strength variables, and we discuss implications for both attitudes and neuroscience research.

Ambivalence and certainty can interact to predict attitude stability over time

“…The difference between ambivalence and certainty is also evident from the studies showing that experimental manipulations of attitude certainty fail to affect ambivalence (e.g., Barden & Petty, 2008;Clarkson, Tormala, & Rucker, 2008;Dubois, Rucker, & Tormala, 2011;Petrocelli, Tormala, & Rucker, 2007), and studies showning effects of certainty on various attitude-relevant outcomes, either controlling for or in the absence of ambivalence effects (e.g., Alvarez & Brehm, 1997;Bassili, 1996;Craig, Martinez, & Kane, 2005;McGraw, Hasecke, & Conger, 2003;Petrocelli et al, 2007). Finally, some recent research shows that certainty and ambivalence activate different areas of the brain (Luttrell, Stillman, Hasinski, & Cunningham, 2015).…”

Attitude strength: Distinguishing predictors versus defining features

“…For example, confirmatory factor analyses find superior fit for models assuming each attitude attribute constitutes its own latent factor (Krosnick, Boninger, Chuang, Berent, & Carnot, 1993;Lavine, Huff, Wagner, & Sweeney, 1998). Different attitude attributes also correspond to activity in distinct brain regions (Luttrell, Stillman, Hasinski, & Cunningham, 2016), manipulations of one attribute do not necessarily affect other attributes (e.g. Clarkson, Tormala, & Rucker, 2008;Luttrell, Petty, Briñol, & Wagner, 2016), and these attributes exert independent effects on attitude strength outcomes (see Visser et al, 2006 for a comprehensive review of this point).…”

Brain activation to high-calorie food images in healthy normal weight and obese children: a fMRI study

“…Several neuroimaging studies in adults have linked DMPFC activation to social cognition, mentation, and processing information related to social judgment [ 22 ]. DMPFC also plays an important role in decision making and response control in a variety of contexts [ 23 , 24 ], particularly under conflicting and uncertain conditions [ 25 , 26 ]. In adults, value signal of different options is encoded in MPFC and is also activated when making food decisions [ 27 , 28 ].…”