Emotion and Persuasion in Advertising: What We Do and Don't Know About Affect

Emotion and persuasion is an old topic in psychology and a difficult one to apply to advertising. Affect appears to have four possible effects on “learning” from advertising and a direct effect on advertising effectiveness in low depth-of-processing situations. But understanding and measurement of the cognitive neuro-psychological underpinnings of the effect of affect is incomplete and often applied in an oversimplistic way.