Ambivalence

Ambivalence is a state of having simultaneous conflicting reactions, beliefs, or feelings towards some object. Stated another way, ambivalence is the experience of having an attitude towards someone or something that contains both positively and negatively valenced components. The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness.
Although attitudes tend to guide attitude-relevant behavior, those held with ambivalence tend to do so to a lesser extent. The less certain an individual is in their attitude, the more impressionable it becomes, hence making future actions less predictable and/or less decisive. Ambivalent attitudes are also more susceptible to transient information, which can result in a more malleable evaluation. However, since ambivalent people think more about attitude-relevant information, they also tend to be more persuaded by attitude-relevant information than less-ambivalent people.
Explicit ambivalence may or may not be experienced as psychologically unpleasant when the positive and negative aspects of a subject are both present in a person's mind at the same time. Psychologically uncomfortable ambivalence, also known as cognitive dissonance, can lead to avoidance, procrastination, or to deliberate attempts to resolve the ambivalence. People experience the greatest discomfort from their ambivalence at the time when the situation requires a decision to be made. People are aware of their ambivalence to varying degrees, so the effects of an ambivalent state vary across individuals and situations. For this reason, researchers have considered two forms of ambivalence, only one of which is subjectively experienced as a state of conflict.

Types of attitudinal ambivalence

Felt ambivalence

The psychological literature has distinguished between several different forms of ambivalence. One, often called subjective ambivalence or felt ambivalence, represents the psychological experience of conflict, mixed feelings, mixed reactions, and indecision in the evaluation of some object. Ambivalence is not always acknowledged by the individual experiencing it. Although, when the individual becomes aware to a varying degree, discomfort is felt, which is elicited by the conflicting attitudes about a particular stimulus.
Subjective ambivalence is generally assessed using direct self-report measures regarding one's experience of conflict about the topic of interest. Because subjective ambivalence is a secondary judgment of a primary evaluation, it is considered to be metacognitive. The point of these measures is to find out how much a person experiences ambivalence in a particular evaluation. Their report may be provided in a number of ways.
Priester and Petty, for example, utilized a rating system where they had subjects rate the level of conflict they were experiencing on a scale from 0 to 10. However, people do not like to experience the negative emotions associated with ambivalence and therefore may not acknowledge, or report, their level of conflict as accurately as possible. This makes the measure of felt ambivalence a bit less reliable than a researcher may desire.

Potential ambivalence

Another measure of ambivalence that has been developed is called objective ambivalence or potential ambivalence, which represents the simultaneous acknowledgement of both positive and negative evaluations regarding a particular stimulus. Objective ambivalence is an indirect measure of attitude conflict that allows individuals to answer questions based on more accessible aspects of their attitude and is therefore generally viewed as an advantageous means of measurement. This indirect measure does not assume that the individual has complete knowledge and/or awareness of their attitudinal conflict and helps to eliminate confounding factors that may be affecting their attitudes.
Objective ambivalence is generally assessed using a method first developed by Kaplan, in which a standard bipolar attitude scale is split into two separate scales, each independently assessing the magnitude of one valence. If a person endorses both positive and negative reactions towards the same object, then at least some objective ambivalence is present.
Kaplan initially defined ambivalence as total affect minus polarity. For example, if objective ambivalence towards exercising was assessed using two separate 6-point scales, and a person indicated that his or her evaluation was slightly negative and extremely positive, this person's ambivalence would be quantified by 2 times the lesser of these two evaluations.
Kaplan's measure yields the formula:
Here, S represents the smaller rating or reaction, and L represents the larger rating or dominant reaction.
However, Kaplan's measure has largely been replaced in practice by one proposed by Thompson et al. Thompson' s formula fulfills the three necessary conditions for any scale measuring ambivalence as suggested by Breckler.
The three conditions are as follows:

If the larger value is maintained, while the smaller rating increases, ambivalence will increase.
If the smaller value is maintained, while the larger rating increases, ambivalence will decrease.
If both the larger and smaller values are the same, ambivalence will increase when both ratings increase or decrease as the values decrease.

Thompson et al. refined Kaplan's formula to incorporate Breckler's components:

Predictors of felt ambivalence

Research has shown only a moderate correlation between felt and potential ambivalence, although, both measures are useful depending on what is being asked. Potential ambivalence is often utilized by ambivalence researchers to gather more information about diversity of attitudes across contexts. Each individual experiences the after-effects of unpleasant feelings in a different way, whether or not associated with ambivalence awareness.
There are two primary moderators that link felt and potential ambivalence: simultaneous accessibility and preference for consistency.
Simultaneous accessibility is when potential ambivalence depends on how quickly and uniformly conflicting evaluations come to mind. Positive and negative knowledge regarding beliefs about an attitude object are concurrently known, but not always accessible. Only when the connection of the evaluations are applicable and coinciding to awareness, does potential ambivalence result in felt ambivalence.
Preference for consistency uses incentives to combine incoming stimuli with current variables in order to respond to approaching impulses. In other words, people often review past behaviors when making new decisions; if preference for consistency is high, they are more likely to ignore new information and are thus bias to past behaviors.

Dimensions of attitudinal assessment as applied to ambivalence

One-dimensional perspective

Traditionally, attitudes were considered one-dimensional—from positive to negative—but given the rise of research findings, this perspective has lost much of its value. Ambivalence studies were a primary reason that attitudinal assessments demanded a new design. Because the basic assumption of an ambivalent attitude is that it is paradoxical, a one-dimensional perspective is likely to portray faulty information. For instance, a numerical rating of zero can be produced both by someone with a love-hate relationship toward an object, and someone who is completely indifferent about that object. There is a significant difference in the behaviors and experiences of those possessing strong conflicting attitudes, compared to those who are simply neutral. This perspective is unsuitable for examining ambivalence and based on current research does not appear to accurately reflect how attitudes function and are experienced.

Two-dimensional perspective

The two-dimensional perspective separately rates positive and negative attitudes toward an attitudinal object. The relative magnitude of positive and negative rankings are recognized by this model, providing a distinction between ambivalence and indifference. By comparing the magnitude of attitudes, the two-dimensional perspective also allows for an approximation of the degree of ambivalence; similarity in the magnitude of an individual's positive and negative attitude towards an object indicating ambivalence, and the strength of these attitudes reveals its degree. The two-dimensional view can report everything the one-dimensional perspective can, but it has the added ability to account for ambivalence. Though this model of attitude is clearly more useful for understanding and potentially assessing ambivalence than a one dimensional model it still suffers numerous paradoxes which are difficult to argue away without acknowledging that there is more contributing to one's attitudes and their stability than perceptions regarding the object alone. These issues prompt the recent emergence of multidimensional models.

Multidimensional perspective

The Multidimensional model for attitude deviates from the linear perspectives previously mentioned. Conceptually the multidimensional model can be thought of as a network of attitudinal hubs which form a web of contributions contributing to one's attitude about a particular object. Thus ones attitude toward an object is a product of the attitudes one holds for all related objects which are activated consciously or unconsciously when considering the object in question, and is not simply an attribution regarding the object alone in a vacuum. Ambivalence occurs when there are near equal weight of contributions of both positive and negative sources according to this perspective. Note in this view the ambivalent attitude is not tied directly to the object but rather the near equivalence of positive and negative contributing attitudes.
This model is very useful for understanding why attitude towards an object can fluctuate often within a relatively short span. If this model is accurate than a change in the degree of activation of particular objects related to the attitudinal object in question will alter the degree to which they contribute their attitudinal influence towards one's current attitude regarding the object in question. This allows for variance in attitude towards an object without requiring any permanent change in one's beliefs regarding neither the object nor the objects related to it. According to this model one's attitude towards eating a high calorie dessert food would likely become more positive during times when an individual is hungry, as the centers associated with the satiation property of food are now more active and contributing more influence to the attitude regarding consuming the dessert. The other contributing attitudes do not need to have been suppressed for the temporary change in attitude all that is required, is an increase in the output of one contributor.
Continued or repeated activation of the same related objects to a given attitudinal object will likely be reinforced and over time lend more stability to the attitude, and are likely to diminish the activation of those objects not strongly activated; however, the contributing objects are themselves also subject to changes in attitudes regarding them, so no final resolution of stability will necessarily occur. In addition if the same conflicting attitudinal contributors are continuing to "fire together" they will both be reinforced and thus may not contribute towards the resolution of ambivalence.