[6] The term also refers to situations where "mixed feelings" of a more general sort are experienced, or where a person experiences uncertainty or indecisiveness.
[9] Explicit ambivalence may or may not be experienced as psychologically unpleasant when the positive and negative aspects of a subject are both present in a person's mind at the same time.
[5] Subjective ambivalence is generally assessed using direct self-report measures regarding one's experience of conflict about the topic of interest.
[4] Because subjective ambivalence is a secondary judgment of a primary evaluation (i.e., I'm conflicted of my positive attitude towards the president), it is considered to be metacognitive.
This indirect measure does not assume that the individual has complete knowledge and/or awareness of their attitudinal conflict and helps to eliminate confounding factors that may be affecting their attitudes.
[5] Preference for consistency uses incentives to combine incoming stimuli with current variables in order to respond to approaching impulses.
This perspective is unsuitable for examining ambivalence and based on current research does not appear to accurately reflect how attitudes function and are experienced.
[19] The relative magnitude of positive and negative rankings are recognized by this model, providing a distinction between ambivalence and indifference.
If a successful univalent attitude is achieved, final evaluations are labelled as either true or false based on varying degrees of confidence.
In the past, consistency theorists focused primarily on the instinctive drive to reduce this psychological discomfort and return to a simple, balanced state.
Social ties, for example, can be analyzed in terms of an individual's perception of the relationships between his or her self (p), another person (o), and the topic (e.g., issue, belief, value, object) of focus (x).
[22] Past studies have linked ambivalent mental states to slower response times (due to low accessibility) and mild attitudes, although theories of evaluative-cognitive consistency have yet to report such findings.
Currently, however, research has proven that not all cognitive inconsistencies are equally upsetting, for it is not necessarily the dissonance itself that causes strife, rather, it is the individuals construct of the given contention.
According to present research, there are three widely accepted methods to reduce cognitive dissonance: As noted above, the desire to maintain one's preconceived notions can have vast implications.
The information is less accessible, so it takes longer for a person to integrate multiple viewpoints regarding an attitude object into one cohesive opinion or judgement.
Yet, since it takes a greater amount of effort to resolve two conflicting attitudes, if one desires to form a conclusion, a more extensive thought process is necessary.
[25] Both personal and circumstantial aspects must be considered in order to accurately assess relationship sustainability between subjective and objective ambivalence.
Particularly, those possessing the need for cognition, or the inclination to evaluate the discrepancies between positive and negative emotions, are less likely to experience ambivalence.
Bottom-up processing shows how greater cognitive effort entwined with combined beliefs results in non congruent information.
[7] Gebauer, Maio, and Pakizeh discuss the possibility that many perfectionists, despite the seemingly positive qualities exerted, are at risk of neglecting internal inconsistencies.
Each of these goals independently are viewed as positive, but when conjoined in regards to actually eating more food, the resulting conflict prompts ambivalence.
Bottom-up processing shows how greater cognitive effort entwined with combined beliefs results in incongruent information.
[12][26] Under those circumstances, people generally pay more attention to information that is relevant to their ambivalent state, in particular when it is perceived as having the potential to reduce discomfort.
[5] The concept of ambivalence was introduced into psychiatric parlance by Eugen Bleuler, who used it in print for the first time in his 1910 article Vortrag über Ambivalenz.
[33] Volitional ambivalence refers to an inability to decide on an action—what Montaigne called "a spirit justly balanced betweene two equal desires".
[34] The concept (if not Bleuler's term) had a long prehistory, reaching back through Buridan's ass, starving between two equally attractive bales of hay in the Middle Ages, to Aristotle.
[35] Intellectual ambivalence—the sceptical belief that "There is no reason but hath a contrary to it"[36] —also follows a long tradition reaching back through Montaigne to Sextus Empiricus and Pyrrho.
[40] Freud was swift to pick up Bleuler's concept of ambivalence, applying it to areas he had previously dealt with in terms of ambiguous language,[41] or the persistent co-existence of love and hatred aimed at the same person.
[47] Thus, for example, an analytic patient's love for his father might be quite consciously experienced and openly expressed—while his "hate" for the same object might be heavily repressed and only indirectly expressed, and thus only revealed in analysis.
Another relevant distinction is that whereas the psychoanalytic notion of "ambivalence" sees it as engendered by all neurotic conflict, a person's everyday "mixed feelings" may easily be based on a quite realistic assessment of the imperfect nature of the thing being considered.