The impact of emotion elicited by political advertising on candidate evaluations

Abstract

This study examines viewers’ emotional responses to print political advertising. It demonstrates that positive and negative direct (attack) political advertising differ in the emotional responses that they elicit. Consistent with prior research on emotion, positive and direct attack political advertising generate different amounts of message recall and produce different quantities of positive and negative cognitive responses. Most importantly, this study establishes the importance of ad-evoked emotion in the formation process of ad exposure and candidate evaluation. Integrating findings from this study, a model is proposed that establishes the relationship of four important variables: ad valence, ad-evoked emotion, attitude toward the ad, and candidate liking. It suggests that (1) ad valence has an impact on attitude toward the candidate via the mediation of ad-evoked emotion; (2) ad valence has an impact on attitude toward the ad via the mediation of ad-evoked emotion; (3) attitude toward the ad has an impact on candidate evaluation; and (4) ad-evoked emotion can explain variations of candidate evaluations beyond that which can be accounted for by attitude toward the ad.