AUTHOR=Fonseca Ricardo , Blascovich James , Garcia-Marques Teresa TITLE=Challenge and threat motivation: effects on superficial and elaborative information processing JOURNAL=Frontiers in Psychology VOLUME=5 YEAR=2014 URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/psychology/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01170 DOI=10.3389/fpsyg.2014.01170 ISSN=1664-1078 ABSTRACT=

This paper integrates the motivational states of challenge and threat within a dual processing perspective. Previous research has demonstrated that individuals experience a challenge state when individuals have sufficient resources to cope with the demands of a task (Blascovich et al., 1993). Because the experience of resource availability has been shown to be associated with superficial processing (Garcia-Marques and Mackie, 2007), we tested the hypothesis that challenge is associated with superficial processing in two persuasion experiments. Experiment 1 revealed that inducing attitudes of participants in a challenge state was not sensitive to the quality of arguments presented. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the effect occurs even when task engagement, manipulated by the presence (vs. the absence) of a task observer (Blascovich et al., 1993), is high. The implications of these results for the biopsychosocial model model and the cognitive and motivational literature are discussed.