Javier Horcajo

Autonomous University of Madrid | UAM · Social and Methodological Psychology

The Personal Need for Structure (PNS) scale assesses individuals’ tendency to seek out clarity and structured ways of understanding and interacting with their environment. The main aim of this study was to adapt the PNS scale to Spanish and assess its psychometric properties. There are two versions of the PNS scale being used, which vary in the num...

This study analysed the effects of perfectionism on the formation of attitudes and expectations of organisational behaviour in potential recruiters. Specifically, the dimensions of perfectionism proposed by Hewitt and Flett were analysed in relation to the meta-cognitive process of thought self-validation. Participants were randomly exposed to the...

The current study employed a within-participant design to analyze the effects of head movements in three conditions (i.e., head nodding, head shaking, and no head movements) during positive (motivational) self-talk among 22 male cyclists. After the self-talk and head-movements task, physical performance (i.e., anaerobic power) was assessed using a...

Background:: In this study, we examined whether a persuasive message in favor of a pro-environmental proposal could influence attitude change through a self-validation process when individuals were told that the source of the proposal belonged to their ingroup (vs. their outgroup). Method:: Participants read a message that advocated for the use of...

The current study analyzed the effects of positive versus negative self-talk on physical performance in soccer players from a multiprocess approach. We operationalized the process distinction using the need-for-cognition (NC) construct. Thus, NC was measured and self-talk (i.e., positive vs. negative) was manipulated between participants (i.e., 126...

Training systems based on high-intensity interval training (HIIT) have experienced great influence in recent years within the context of exercise and sport. This study aims to provide insight on whether the immediate outcomes (e.g., central and peripheral acute responses) may be intensified or attenuated when a HIIT protocol is performed using a FF...

Background: Need for affect (NA) refers to individual differences in the motivation to approach or avoid emotion-inducing situations and activities. Prior research has demonstrated that NA is a relevant construct for understanding psychological processes related to affect. The present study aimed to adapt and validate the English version of the Ne...

This research examines how people can defend themselves from the threat associated with the COVID‐19 pandemic by relying more on their recently generated thoughts (unrelated to the threat), thus leading those thoughts to have a greater impact on judgement through a meta‐cognitive process of thought validation. Study 1 revealed that the impact of th...

The aim of this systematic review with meta-analysis was to examine the influence of exogenous factors related to nutritional and hydration strategies and environmental conditions, as modulators of fatigue, including factors associated with performance fatigability and perceived fatigability, in endurance tests lasting 45 min to 3 h. A search was c...

Background: The present study analyzes how attitudes can polarize after reminders of death in the context of persuasion, and proposes that a meta-cognitive process (i.e., self-validation) can serve as a compensatory coping mechanism to deal with mortality salience. Method: Participants were first asked to read either a strong or a weak resume of...

The aim of this study was to examine differences in achievement motivation (measured with the Objective Achievement Motivation Test, OLMT, Schuhfried®) and competitiveness between male and female semi-professional football players. The OLMT objectively assessed three constructs regarding achievement motivation: motivation through personal goals, as...

In the present research, we analyzed the effects of self-efficacy (SE) on physical and cognitive performance in real-world settings as a function of the metacognitive certainty in SE. In three studies, participants completed a measure of SE, which asked them to report how sure they were that they can achieve several specific results on various athl...

To better understand doping-related attitude change, it is important to consider not only the amount of thinking (i.e., elaboration) done by message recipients, but also the favorability of their thoughts in response to the proposal, as well as the perceived validity in their thoughts. The main goal of the present study was to analyze the effects o...

This meta-analysis evaluated theoretical predictions from balanced identity theory (BIT) and evaluated the validity of zero points of Implicit Association Test (IAT) and self-report measures used to test these predictions. Twenty-one researchers contributed individual subject data from 36 experiments (total N = 12,773) that used both explicit and i...

This research introduces a new approach for separating people from their thoughts by anticipating selling them to others. Participants were asked to write down either positive or negative thoughts about fast food on different pieces of paper. Then, participants were randomly assigned to role-play the part of either potential buyers or sellers for a...

Research has shown that athletes’ attitudes towards the use of banned performance-enhancing substances are reliable predictors of their intentions to use these substances, which in turn can be relevant predictors of their actual doping behaviours. Despite the important role played by attitudes and intentions in doping, research analysing how to cha...

This article describes the basic mechanisms by which the nonverbal behavior of a communicator can influence recipients’ attitudes and persuasion. We review the literature on classic variables related to persuasive sources (e.g., physical attractiveness, credibility, and power), as well as research on mimicry and facial expressions of emotion, and b...

Research on self-talk has found that what athletes say to themselves influences their performance in sport settings. This experiment analyzed the relationship between positive and negative self-talk and physical performance in light of another variable: overt head movements. Participants were randomly assigned to first generate and then listen to e...

Three experiments examined whether perceiving thoughts as coming from internal versus external origins are more impactful on attitudes. Participants generated either positive or negative thoughts about different attitude objects, including different diets, and plastic surgery. Then, participants were induced to think that their thoughts came from t...

Finally, the authoritative resource that serious cyclists have been waiting for has arrived. The perfect blend of science and application, Cycling Science takes you inside the sport, into the training room and research lab, and onto the course. A remarkable achievement, Cycling Science features the following: Contributions from 43 top cycling scien...

This experiment analyzed whether attitudes towards the legalization of several doping behaviors would resist change and predict behavioral intentions when they were initially formed through thoughtful (i.e., high elaboration) versus nonthoughtful (i.e., low elaboration) processes. Participants were randomly assigned to a first persuasive message ei...

This experiment analysed the effect that deliberative thinking involved in the processing of relevant information had on the convicción of the participants in their doping-related attitudes. Participants were football coaches who received a written proposal (i.e., a persuasive message) against (or in favour of) the legalization of several banned su...

Forewarning of a persuasive attempt has been found to reduce persuasion because people tend to resist being manipulated. Likewise, messages that are high in ambiguity tend to be less persuasive than messages that are clear, among other reasons, because people prefer information that is easy to be processed. The present research postulates that thes...

The present work analyses the predictive validity of measures provided by several available self-report and indirect measurement instruments to assess risk propensity (RP) and proposes a measurement instrument using the Implicit Association Test: the IAT of Risk Propensity Self-Concept (IAT-RPSC), an adaptation of the prior IAT-RP of Dislich et al....

Abstract The aim of this experiment was to analyse the consequences of changing attitudes related to doping through thoughtful versus non-thoughtful processes. Participants were young soccer players. They received a persuasive message either against or in favour of the legalisation of several doping behaviours in soccer (e.g., the use of anabolic a...

This research showed that changing attitudes toward stigmatized groups can result from both the simple processes that require little thinking and the traditional elaborative forms of persuasion that require high thinking processes. Importantly, even when the obtained attitude change was equivalent for situations in which there was high and low mess...

Background: The purpose of this study was to examine the role of thinking in reducing prejudice toward stigmatized groups. Method: Participants received a persuasive message composed of strong arguments in favor of South American immigrants or a control message. In order to distinguish high- from low-elaboration individuals, participants were as...

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In Western dualistic culture, it is assumed that thoughts cannot be treated as material objects; however, language is replete with metaphorical analogies suggesting otherwise. In the research reported here, we examined whether objectifying thoughts can influence whether the thoughts are used in subsequent evaluations. In Experiment 1, participants...

The Need for Cognitive Closure (NCC) refers to the motivation to seek and maintain a definitive answer to a given problem. This mental closure allows people to avoid confusion, ambiguity and uncertainty. The NCC plays a critical role in a variety of processes of diverse nature, including intra-personal (e.g., the higher the NCC, the less generation...

As a part of a research that explores the relationship between risk behavior and sport injury, in the present work authors develop and propose a new instrument to measure risk tendency: The Implicit Association Test of Risk (IAT-R). Concretely, the Implicit Association Test (IAT, Greenwald, McGhee, & Schwartz, 1998) was adapted to measure risk tend...

The present research examines two main issues relevant to consumer persuasion: (1) whether automatic evaluations can change (both directly and indirectly) in response to verbal ads that engage deliberative information processing activity, and (2) whether such messages can result in spreading activation of implicit change that is consistent with bal...

The present research proposes that sources in the numerical majority (vs. minority) can affect persuasion by influencing the confidence with which people hold their thoughts in response to the persuasive message. Participants received a persuasive message composed of either strong or weak arguments that was presented by a majority or a minority sou...

This article describes the basic psychological processes by which emotions can influence attitude change. The first part of the review focuses on the link between emotion and cognition, describing how emotions can influence information processing (e.g., how emotions affect the amount and direction of thoughts generated in response to a persuasive p...

Attitude change toward body image: The role of elaboration on attitude strength. Attitudes toward body image have been shown to play a central role in the understanding and treating of eating disorders. In the present research, participants' attitudes toward their body image were changed through a persuasive procedure involving high mental elaborat...

Las actitudes hacia la imagen que las personas tienen de su cuerpo constituyen un elemento central en la comprensión y el tratamiento de los trastornos del comportamiento alimentario (TCA). En el presente trabajo de investigación se llevó a cabo un estudio en el que se modificaron las actitudes hacia el cuerpo de los participantes a través de un tr...

Las actitudes hacia la imagen que las personas tienen de su cuerpo constituyen un elemento central en la comprensión y el tratamiento de los trastornos del comportamiento alimentario (TCA). En el presente trabajo de investigación se llevó a cabo un estudio en el que se modificaron las actitudes hacia el cuerpo de los participantes a través de un tr...

Usually, well-being has been measured by means of questionnaires or scales. Although most of these methods have a high level of reliability and validity, they present some limitations. In order to try to improve well-being assessment, in the present work, the authors propose a new complementary instrument: The Implicit Overall Well-Being Measure (I...

Based on the demand-control model (DCM), the present research examined the effects of organizational stress on information processing, as well as their consequences for attitude change. Participants were provided with high ( positive stress) or low ( negative stress) resources to cope with the demands of their organization. Following this induction...

Most people want to be (and be seem) rational and objective when making decisions, particularly in professional domains. However, a large number of irrelevant factors can bias judgments and behaviors. The present research reveals that attitudes toward potential job candidates can be influenced by stereotype activation in an experimental context. Sp...

La mayoría de las personas quieren ser (y parecer) racionales y objetivas a la hora de tomar decisiones, sobre todo en contextos profesionales. Sin embargo, multitud de variables aparentemente irrelevantes pueden sesgar los juicios y los comportamientos de las personas. La presente investigación demuestra que la evaluación de un potencial candidato...

Everybody evaluates objects in terms of good and bad. Besides this general tendency, some individuals are more motivated than others to make evaluative judgments. Individual differences in this need to evaluate can be reliably assessed with the Need to Evaluate (NE) Scale development by Jarvis and Petty. The purpose of the present work was to adapt...

This article hypothesizes that the individual-difference variable, need for cognition (NFC), can have opposite implications for priming effects, depending on prime blatancy. Subtle primes are argued to be more effective for high- versus low-NFC individuals. This is because for high-NFC individuals, (a) constructs are generally easier to activate, (...

Las personas juzgamos los objetos de nuestro entorno en términos evaluativos (bueno-malo); pero algunas están más motivadas que otras para hacerlo. La Necesidad de Evaluación (NE) se refiere a estas diferencias individuales. Para su medición, Jarvis y Petty desarrollaron el test de Necesidad de Evaluación. El objetivo de la presente investigación h...

Contemporary research on interpersonal influence has shown that individuals scoring high in Need for Cognition (NC) are able to generate a large number of arguments in order to convince other people. However, research has also shown that such an effort does not necessarily lead them to be more persuasive or more efficient in their group performance...

Health is a state of complete physical, mental, and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity. In order to specify the contents of this positive state, the Complete State Model of Health (CSMH) considers mental health as a series of symptoms of hedonia and positive functioning, operationalized by measures of subjective, p...

Human rights are an essential element of a civil society. Attitudes about these laws and the role of peer influence in shaping these attitudes, has not garnered much attention. This study examined the strategies individuals employ to influence a peers’ beliefs about human rights laws in Spain. One hundred ninety-six participants at the Universidad...

El presente capítulo aborda el fenómeno del cambio de actitudes desde una perspectiva psi-cosocial. Se intenta transmitir una idea básica, en concreto, que el estudio del cambio de actitudes re-sulta fundamental para la Psicología social y, a la vez, para una amplia gama de consecuencias prácticas en el contexto de la política, el marketing, la pub...

La investigación contemporánea sobre influencia interpersonal ha demostrado que las personas con alta Necesidad de Cognición (NC) son capaces de generar numerosos argumentos para convencer a otras personas. No obstante, también se ha demostrado que estos esfuerzos por influir sobre las personas no llevan necesariamente a un desempeño más eficaz de...

The Need for Cognition (NC) refers to the tendency to engage in and enjoy effortful thought (Cacioppo and Petty, 1982). Since individuals with high NC tend to base their attitudes on extensive thinking, their attitudes also tend to be relatively resistant to change. The present research examined the impact of NC on interpersonal influence processes...

Persuasion depends on how people respond (cognitive responses) to the information they receive. Two aspects of these cognitive responses have been emphasized so far on the study of persuasion: the direction of thinking (whether thinking is favorable or unfavorable) and the extent of thinking (whether thinking is extensive or minimal). Recent resear...

This research deals with the consequences of the ambivalence between one's explicit and implicit attitude. Since internal inconsistency is associated with aversive feelings and negative outcomes, individuals with explicit and implicit ambivalence might be motivated to resolve the evaluative conflict by seeking additional information related to the...

Cognitive, individual differences, and intergroup contact factors were examined in the formation of attitudes about human rights and ethnic bias in two studies conducted in Spain. A 7-item scale measuring knowledge about human rights laws in Spain and the European Union was used in both studies. Participants were university students enrolled at the...

Recent research demonstrates that when people affirm themselves they become more vulnerable to persuasion. The dominant explanation for this phenomenon argues that affirming oneself reinforces the self-concept, undermining the need to resist and defend one's attitudes and leading to more openness to change. The present research proposes a new hypot...

Recientes investigaciones demuestran que cuando la gente se afirma a sí misma se vuelve más vulnerable a la persuasión. La explicación dominante de este fenómeno consiste en que la afirmación de uno mismo refuerza el auto-concepto disminuyendo la necesidad de defenderse y aumentando la apertura al cambio. En el presente trabajo se propone una hipót...

Thought-validation and persuasion. Persuasion depends on how people respond (cognitive responses) to the information they receive. Two aspects of these cognitive responses have been emphasized so far on the study of persuasion: the direction of thinking (whether thinking is favorable or unfavorable) and the extent of thinking (whether thinking is e...

The classic theories of cognitive consistency were re-analyzed based on the new theoretical and methodological perspectives of implicit social cognition. According with this view, when an attitude changes, the strength with which the attitude object becomes associated with the valence (positive or negative) is modified. It is postulated that becaus...

Implicit attitude change. Recent attitude research has focused considerable attention on the distinction between implicit and explicit social judgments. Relative to explicit measures, implicit measures (e.g., sequential priming, Implicit Associative Test) are more likely to assess judgments that are fast, unintentional, uncontrollable, unconscious,...

This research analyzes the role of script interruptions in affective judgments. Most of script literature has focused on the relation among script interruptions (Schank y Abelson, 1977) and memory, but there is no empirical research examining the effect of such interruptions in affective judgements. An exploratory research was carried out using jud...

En el presente trabajo se reevaluaron las teorías clásicas de la consistencia cognitiva desde una nueva perspectiva teórica y metodológica basada en los modelos de cognición social implícita. Según este reciente enfoque, cambiar una actitud supone transformar la fuerza con la que el objeto de actitud se asocia a una valencia (bueno o malo). Puesto...

El objetivo de la presente investigación ha sido analizar el efecto en los juicios sobre una determinada situación, de diferentes tipos de alteración o interrupción de un script. Aunque existe evidencia acerca de la relación entre las alteraciones del script propuestas por Schank y Abelson (1977) y el recuerdo, hasta la fecha no se había analizado...

Las medidas explícitas de las actitudes (e.g., auto-informes y cuestionarios) hacen referencia a juicios evaluativos relativamente controlados, deliberados y conscientes. Las medidas implícitas de las actitudes (e.g., priming y test de actitudes implícitas) constituyen evaluaciones más rápidas, inconscientes y difíciles de controlar. De estas últim...

En la presente investigación se estudian las consecuencias de la ambivalencia entre las actitudes explícitas e implícitas. Puesto que cualquier forma de inconsistencia interna está asociada con disfunciones y consecuencias negativas, las personas con ambivalencia entre sus actitudes explícitas e implícitas podrían estar motivadas para resolver ese...

La Necesidad de Cognición (NC) se refiere a la motivación y preferencia que muestran las personas hacia la actividad de pensar (Cacioppo y Petty, 1982). Puesto que las personas con alta NC forman y cambian sus opiniones a través de la elaboración detallada de la información, sus actitudes suelen ser relativamente resistentes al cambio. La presente...

La definición de salud propuesta por la OMS señala que ésta no consiste sólo en la ausencia de enfermedad, sino también en la presencia de un estado de completo bienestar físico, mental y social. Para concretar en qué consiste este estado positivo, el Modelo del Estado Completo de Salud (MECS) ha definido la salud mental como un conjunto de síntoma...