Affect and Persuasion Emotional Responses to Public Service Announcements

Abstract

An experiment was designed to examine the role of emotion in persuasion. In this study, 140 undergraduates viewed eight public service announcements (PSAs) and then reported on their cognitive, emotional, and attitudinal responses to each. Some participants were instructed to attend to their feelings and use them in evaluating the PSAs (heuristic-enabled condition), whereas others were told to dampen their feelings and not let their emotions influence their judgments of the PSAs (heuristic-disabled condition). After controlling for cognition, the data showed a unique and separate effect for each emotion on perceived message effectiveness. However, the manipulations produced no observable effect on the magnitude of association between emotion and perceived effectiveness. Effects of both emotion and cognition on attitude toward the issue were mediated by perceived message effectiveness. A second study showed that perceived effectiveness and liking for the message are distinct judgments. Effectiveness is the...

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 291 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.