ABSTRACT
Every field has its own jargon, and some fields use familiar terms in unfamiliar ways. In everyday life, beliefs range from religious faith to weather forecasts. Many people speak of their values as things they believe in. And having an attitude is sometimes used to mean being stubborn. Researchers tend to equate persuasion with attitude change, yet an exclusive focus on attitude change may obscure shifts in degree of attitude modification, and in underlying beliefs and values. Greatly complicating the task of the persuader is the mixed audience, where some message recipients are in agreement, others on the fence, still others in disagreement. Westen's work on the non-conscious activation of emotions by the use of seemingly unobtrusive cues comports with a larger body of theory and research on priming. From its origins as a field of study, psychology has been divided between theories emphasizing similarities between humans and other animal species and theories emphasizing humans' seemingly distinctive capacity for reason.
