When Arousal Influences Ad Evaluation and Valence Does Not (and Vice Versa)

Abstract

This research examines, across 2 studies, the interplay between the valence and arousal components of affective states and the affective tone of a target ad. In the first study, music was used to induce a pleasant or unpleasant mood, while controlling for arousal. Participants were subsequently exposed to an ad that either had a positive-affective tone or was ambiguous in its affective tone. As predicted, the valence of the affective state colored the evaluation of the ad in a mood-congruent direction, but this coloring effect occurred only when the ad had an ambiguous-affective tone. In the second study, the target ad had a clear positive or negative affective tone, and the valence and arousal dimensions of the mood state were manipulated independently. As predicted, the arousal dimension, but not the valence dimension, influenced ad evaluation. Ad evaluations were more polarized in the direction of the ad's affective tone under high arousal than under low arousal. This effect was more pronounced for self-referent evaluations (e.g., "I like the ad") than for object-referent evaluations (e.g., "The ad is good"), favoring an attributional explanation-the excitation transfer hypothesis-over an attention-narrowing explanation-the dynamic complexity hypothesis. Taken together, the results of the 2 studies stress the important contingency of the affective tone of the ad, when examining the effects of the valence and arousal dimensions of a person's affective state on ad evaluation. The results also provide additional insights into how and when affect serves as information in judgment processes.The sources of affect can be diverse. In ad exposure settings, one source of affect is the consumer's preexisting mood state at the time of exposure. A second source lies in the affective tone of the ad itself (e.g., humorous or fear-inducing). 1 The interplay between the consumer's affective state and the affective content of the ad can have intricate effects on judgments. The purpose of this research is to document the nature of this interplay, formalize its main contingencies, and explore underlying processes.We suggest that to examine this interplay, it is useful to decompose consumers' affective states along their two primary dimensions (Havlena & Holbrook, 1986;Mehrabian & Russell, 1974): valence (pleasant or unpleasant) and arousal (high or low). We propose that each of these two components of consumers' affective states interacts differently with the affective tone of a target ad. Prior research has suggested that the valence component has the effect of "coloring" people's judgments in a mood-congruent direction (e.g., Forgas, 1995;Mayer, Gashke, Braverman, & Evans, 1992). Ceteris paribus, the target ad should be evaluated more favorably when the affective state is pleasant than when it is unpleasant (e.g., JOURNAL OF CONSUMER PSYCHOLOGY, 11(1), 43-55 Copyright © 2001, Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc. Request for reprints should be sent to Michel Tuan Pham, 515 Uris Hall, Graduate School of Business, Columbia Univ...

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