Individual differences in relative hemispheric alpha abundance and cognitive responses to persuasive communications

Three experiments are reported investigating individual differences in interhemispheric electroencephalogram (EEG) activity and cognitive responses to persuasion. Experiment 1 indicated that subjects who were characterized by relative left hemispheric EEG activity over the parietal areas also produced a less affectively polarized profile of thought listings about the persuasive communication. Moreover, this individual difference emerged only when subjects were confronted by the forewarning and message; the basal patterns of interhemispheric EEG activity, which were obtained prior to the announcement of the attitudinal recommendation, did not portend distinguishable profiles of cognitive responding. Experiment 2 replicated the major findings of Experiment 1 using different topics and a within-subjects rather than a between-subjects design. Further analyses suggested that thinking about an attitude issue rather than responding to a persuasive communication was sufficient to obtain the above relationship between interhemispheric EEG alpha abundance and cognitive response. Experiment 3 used Tesser's time-to-think procedure to assess interhemispheric EEG patterning as a function of the affective polarization of topic-relevant thinking. The results supported the expectation that as subjects thought longer about attitude issues they exhibited a shifting of relative hemispheric EEG activity from the left toward the right parietal areas of the cerebral hemispheres. The significance and limitations of these findings for research on attitude change and the utility of including psychophysiological approaches to elusive research problems in personality and social psychology are discussed.