ABSTRACT
In the active participation conditions, there was a direct relationship between language intensity and attitude change following creation of the messages. Since strong language should produce more stress in receivers, greater motivation to comply with requested changes so as to restore cognitive consistency should occur. In the conceptualizations developed about fear-arousing messages, opinionated language, and language intensity, there appears to have been an intuitive bias for predictions that stronger, highly graphic language would be more persuasively effective. The active and passive participation paradigms differ importantly. In the passive message reception paradigm, the persuader acts, by transmitting a message, while the persuadee is acted upon. Michael Burgoon and L. B. King examined strategies for overcoming resistance to persuasion previously conferred by inoculation techniques. Burgoon and L. J. Chase found that when inoculation messages differed in linguistic structure from attack messages, the amount of persuasion prompted by those messages differed.
