Affect,Reason, and Persuasion Advertising Strategies That Predict Affective and Analytic-Cognitive Responses

Advertisements are messages designed with the goal of persuasion and can therefore be considered as ecologically valid examples of persuasive messages. The study of responses to advertisements can provide insights into the interplay of affective and analytic-cognitive aspects of the persuasion process. This study develops and tests hypotheses concerning the relationship of specific advertising strategies to affective (syncretic-cognitive) and analytic cognitive responses in the audience. Specifically, it is postulated that different advertising strategies predict different patterns of affective and analytic cognition with product involvement and other relevant variables controlled. Two hundred forty advertisements are analyzed both in terms of their strategy attributes and the reactions they evoke. Advertising strategy variables are demonstrated to account substantially for the variance in affective and analytic cognition.     

COGNITIVE SWITCHING: A BEHAVIORAL TRACE OF HUMAN INFORMATION PROCESSING FOR TELEVISION NEWSCASTS

A theory of cognitive switching is presented which was developed from human performance literature and signaled stopping research. The purpose of the study was to validate the basic constructs of the theory and to present data which display behavioral traces of the ways people organize television news into their information-processing system during the actual reception of the messages. The findings suggest (1) that people cognitively switch for four basic reasons (functions) to: agree, disagree, think, and question; and (2) that people exhibit similar cognitive switching behaviors in similar information-processing situations, even though the content of the stimulus changes. Limitations of this type of research are discussed and implications for further study are suggested.