A Visual Approach to SPSS for Windows 2nd Edition by Leonard Stern

Exercise 5

To help understand why people who write a few sentences about why a value is most important to them (e.g., religion, social relationships, the pursuit of knowledge) become less defensive about information that may be threatening to them, Crocker, Niiya, and Mischkowski (2008) had 102 participants rank six values from most to least important then either write for 10 minutes about why their highest ranked value was most important to them (the values affirmation condition) or why their lowest ranked value may be most important to others (the control condition). Participants then rated how strongly they experienced various feelings, including love, on a 1-5 scale (1 = not at all and 5 = extremely) while writing their essay. Participants in the values affirmation who were smokers were found to be more accepting of a research article that claimed to find new evidence of a harmful effect on health than smokers in the control condition. Crocker et al. found evidence that feelings of love accounted for this change.
The data file LoveRatings.sav contains, for each of the participants in the study, a rating of feelings of love on a 1-5 point scale in the variable rating, and the participant's experimental condition (values affirmation or control) in the variable condition. Plot the distribution of the rated feelings of love (an ordinal scale) broken down by experimental condition.