Abstract

MESSAGE OPINIONATION AND APPROVAL-DEPENDENCE AS DETERMINANTS OF RECEIVER ATTITUDE CHANGE AND RECALL JOHN R. BASEHEART titude toward those individuals who ANGUAGE, as one message variable agree or disagree with his position. For j assumed to influence the attitude example, the statement "Only a stupid change process, has attracted the interest fool would fail to recognize that U. S. of a number of communication research- involvement in Vietnam is immoral" is ers. Bowers,1 Carmichael and Cronk- an opinionated one since it reveals the hite,2 and McEwen and Greenberg,3 for communicator's unfavorable attitude to- example, attempted to assess the effect ward U. S. involvement in the war and of differing levels of language intensity the communicator's unfavorable evalua- on recipient attitude change; Sencer,4 tion of anyone who might favor further and Razinsky5 studied the effect of the U. S. participation in the war. Nonopin- grammaticalness of language on recip- ionated statements, on the other hand, ient attitudes. One other language vari- are those statements which tell the mes- able which has interested some commu- sage recipient only how the source of nication researchers is that of language the message feels about some particular "opinionation" as discussed by Ro- attitude object. For