MEASURING EMOTIONAL RESPONSE TO ADVERTISING.“ Patricia A. StoutJohn D: Leckenby. . .Patricia A. Stout is Assistant Professor of Advertising at theUniversity of Texas, Austin.Her Ph.D. in Communication‘k from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Herresearch interests ● re copy research, ● motional response totelevision ● dvertising and nonverbal features of ● dvertising.Her research has been published in the proceedings of theAmerican Academy of Advertising and of the AmericanMarketing Association.John D: Leckenby has been the Everett D. Collier CentennialChair in Communication ● nd Chairman of the Department ofAdvertising in the College of Communication at Universityof Texas at Austin since 1985. Prior to that time he wasProfessor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Departmentof Advertising and Research Professor in the Institute ofCommunications Research at the University of Illinois atUrbana-Champaign where he had been since 1974. He was aVisiting Scholar in the Graduate School of Business ● ndInstitute for Communication Research ● t Stanford Univer-sity in 1984-85. He has been a Visiting Professor ● t Young& Rubicam-New York. His research interests ● re in the areasof copy research and media model research. He is the authorof ● n ● dvertising management text ● nd has published inJournal of Marketing Research, Journal of Advertising Re-search, Journal of Advertising, Journalism Quarterly, Journalof Broadcasting and several other ● cademic journals.The ● uthors thank Young & Rubicam-New York forsupplying data used in this study.ABSTRACTUnders@nding how consumers respond ● motionally to advertiaing @ necessary before we cars understand the relation-ship betWen ● motional response and ● dvertising ● ffectiveness.In this •tq~, emotion is conceptualized ● a a multidimensionalconstruct.- A typology is presented which addresses how peo-ple respond ● motionally to ● dvertising on three progressivelyinvolved levels (“descriptive,“ “’empathic”” ● nd “experiential”).This typology is ● pplied to verbatim responses of 1498 re-spondents viewing 50 television commercials. The relation-ships ● mong ● motional response ● nd ● ttitude to the ad,● ttitude to the brand, purchase intenk brand recall ● nd adcontent playback ● re reported.Received October 30, 1985. Revision accepted for publics.(ion August 7, 1986..–INTRODUCTION-.. .The need to develop discriminating measures of..emotional response to advertising has become increas-ingly important. Recent findings (17, 26) indicatethat attitude toward the advertising execution itself“’ leads to changes in brand attitudes. This has led toa focus on feelings and emotion in process modelsof how advertising works. Although some work .inthis area reflects a particular conceptual interestin affect as “preference”or “liking” (5, 38) and itieffects on judgments, others have turned to the morespecific role of particular emotions in the consump-tion experience (1, 19).Efforts to determine the role emotion plays inresponse to advertising first require discriminatingmeasures of consumers’ emotional response. Previ-ous research by the authors outlined a framework forconceptualizing consumers’ emotional response toadvertising and - presented pilot study results (34 ).The present paper restates part of the typology indetail and addresses two questions: 1) How do peo-ple respond emotionally to advertising? and 2) Whatis the relationship between emotional response andmore traditional measures of advertising effectiveness?The results of an application of the typology toverbatim responses of 1498 respondents viewing50 television commercials are also presented.BACKGROUNDPast studies (29, 37) show that cognitive responsesare weak in explaining ad-induced changes in attitudesin “low involvement” conditions. Assuming othermediating processes are missing from the set of cogni-tive responses usually analyzed, research now focuseson“two alternative routes” of persuasion (30).Additional affective responses, such as attitude tothe ad and attitude to the brand, were proposed toserve as mediators intervening between conditionsand behavior (4, 5, 26). In high- and low-involvementsituations, it is thought that affect toward the brandmight be different.Shirnp (33) suggests that potion might be moreimportant in low-involvement. parity product choices.Exactly how this works, ho~ver, is uncertain. Yet,increasingly, emotion is seen. as a potential “affec-tive”mediator of attitudes and presumably, otherlevels of advertising effectiveness.Consumers’ -feelings about advertising have longintrigued advertising copy researchers. Verbatim0 JOURNAL OF ADVERTISING, vol. 15, No. 4,19863567’7responses have been used to develop several multi-dimensional’ scales for determining the dimensionsviewers use to rate ads (32, 35, 36). Factor analyticwork on such scales has identified several dimensionsreflecting; both product- and execution-related~ responses.Several of these dimensions appem toindicate’ emotional -response to advertising, ‘-such as“empathy”and “confusion” (32), “humor, vigor,- SWISUOWeSS and irritation” (36), and “liking ~dmeanir$fulness” (35). More recently, researchershave concentrated on particular types of feelingselicited in response to advertising, like “warmth”(1).Research on emotion in advertising, however,conceptualizes emotional response as a unidimensionalconstruct. This fails to tap the potential richness ofthe measure. Several streams of research in psychologyand social psychology lend support to the notion ofa multidimensional construct, where the individualis capable o~ responding at progressively abstractlevels. In the next section, a theoretical frameworkfor multiple levels of emotional response is pre-sented. Following that, the possible linkage of emo-tional response and advertising effectiveness is re-viewed and explored.A MULTIDIMENSIONAL TYPOLOGYOF EMOTIONAL RESPONSEThere is little agreement on the definition ofemotion (23), although attempts are made to resolvethe confusing terminology (20). In the presentstudy, we investigate the subjective feelings or “feltexperience” of emotion as verbally expressed by theindividual.“Emotional response” is defined as aresponse to some psychologically important event,real or imagined, past or anticipated. An “emotionalresponse”exhibits