ABSTRACT
Part of the psychological meaning of things in our subjective world is the posture or attitude we take towards them. Because these attitudes are so important to our social life, psychologists have long segregated them out for special attention. The investigation and measurement of attitudes is one of the most venerable enterprises in social psychology. Because of the special interest in attitudes, we use this chapter to demonstrate ways of extracting information about them from associative data. We also try to draw the implications of the principle that the affective associative meaning of a stimulus is reflected by the aggregate affective meaning of the responses. Such a notion implies that affectivity may be assumed, irrespective of the specific content from which it comes. But the actual associative responses enable us to examine the semantic content of evaluation, something that is difficult to do with traditional attitude measurement.
