Program Goals/Target Population
Evaluative Conditioning (EC) for adolescents at risk for violence in South Korea was a strategy intended to modify adolescents’ implicit, or underlying, attitudes toward violence through a reflective conditioning process. Youth were identified as at-risk after receiving in-school counseling services for committing an act of school violence. Through this process, youth were trained to associate violence concepts (such as assaults, threats, or fights) with negative attributes (such as disgusting, terrible, or failed) and to associate peaceful concepts (such as harmony, care, or cooperation) with positive attributes (such as valuable, wonderful, or confident). The goal was to change positive attitudes toward violence into negative views by conditioning the youth to associate violence with negativity and peace with positivity. The target population comprised adolescents in middle and high schools in South Korea who demonstrated violence-supportive cognitions (Jeon, Lee, and Lee 2019).
Program Theory
A risk factor for violent behavior in adolescents is the maladaptive cognition of violence during adolescence (Huesmann and Guerra 1997). That is, some adolescents’ impulsive thoughts about violence may cause them to behave in ways that interfere with coping effectively in society. The dual-process, social-cognitive theory of aggression suggests that the cause and continuation of violent behavior can be explained through the existence of explicit and implicit cognition (Szlachcic et al. 2015). Explicit attitudes are thoughts and beliefs that are consciously formed, are deliberate, and can be reported, whereas implicit attitudes are formed on the subconscious level and are difficult to articulate or self-report. This theory suggests that implicit cognition that is supportive of violence works though automatic processing and increases access to aggressive thoughts when interpreting social situations (Greenwald and Banaji 1995). Thus, if individuals already have subconscious positive associations with violence, they may exhibit violent responses more easily and quickly than more peaceful responses in general social situations.
EC was based on the associate-propositional evaluation (APE) model, a dual-process model of attitude formation. The APE model suggests that explicit and implicit attitudes are rooted in two different types of mental processes. Explicit attitudes are formed through slow propositional processes, and implicit attitudes are formed though quick association (Gawronski and Bodenhausen 2011). According to this theory, explicit attitudes can be controlled with cognitive effort and often reflect what is socially acceptable in one’s environment. However, implicit attitudes are difficult to control or change because they are triggered by associative cues without any conscious awareness. Therefore, even if individuals learn to modify explicit attitudes through conscious reasoning, implicit violence-supportive cognitions could be evoked by exposure to cues associated with violence through an absence of conscious control.
EC was based on the principle of classical conditioning, whereby a conditioned response is elicited following repeated pairing of neutral stimuli with unconditioned stimuli. However, this program’s approach was to replace unconditioned stimuli with positive or negative stimuli to change implicit attitudes toward violence (Baeyens, Field, and Houwer 2005).
Program Activities
The program was conducted through a go/no-go task, so that participants did not notice the intent of the intervention. A go/no-go task is a test that requires the subject to either respond or not respond in order to measure inhibition. For this intervention, each adolescent was required to press the “space” key on a computer in a “go” trial, and to refrain from pressing the “space” key in a “no-go” trial. The program activity first consisted of seven blocks, each with different themes of items as go or no-go indicators. The themes included “animal” (which was a practice block), “fruits,” “country,” “city,” “sports,” “home appliances,” and “clothing.” Participants were instructed to either press or not press the space key when items appeared to correspond with the specific theme. Additionally, participants were shown conditioning pairs, which included one target word (i.e., violence-related words such as “threat,” or peace-related words such as “harmony”) and one word with negative or positive connotations (e.g., “nasty” or “beautiful,” respectively). When participants indicated a “go” for violence and positive connotation words, they were considered to have a positive implicit attitude toward violence. Conversely, when participants indicated a “go” for violence and negative connotation words, they were considered to have a negative implicit attitude toward violence. The idea was that the more quickly participants responded (i.e., by pressing the space bar), the stronger their implicit attitude toward violence. In other words, because the association already existed in the participants’ minds, their reaction time would be reduced.
