Title from title page of PDF (University of Missouri--St. Louis, viewed February 23, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 53-60).

Marketers and advertisers have long searched for new and more powerful ways to measure the effectiveness of advertising. One data source that has proven useful is consumers’ moment-to-moment affective responses to advertisements. The first essay of my dissertation examines consumers’ moment-to-moment evaluations of advertisements and presents an application of principal components analysis that allows researchers to understand divergence in consumer response and link this divergence to specific elements of the ad’s storyline. While traditional research has focused on the aggregate peak, final moment and linear trend of consumers’ affect traces in predicting overall evaluations of the advertisement, this application provides better predictions of holdout evaluations. Additionally, I find these traditional measures do not provide insight into consumers’ credibility assessments of the advertisement and illustrate that these evaluations are determined much earlier in the advertisement. The second essay of my dissertation examines how important consumer characteristics (receiver factors), such as prior brand attitude and product category involvement, impact consumers’ moment-to-moment affective responses to advertisements. I also examine how these consumer characteristics moderate the relationship between consumers’ affect traces and important downstream variables such as attitude toward the ad, attitude toward the brand and likelihood to purchase the product. I demonstrate that consumers form biased evaluations based on their prior brand attitude and category involvement and illustrate how advertisers can reduce these biases resulting in greater attitude change in consumers less positively predisposed to the product. / text

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[Truncated abstract] The anxiety-assimilation hypothesis (Wilder, 1993) and the capacity constraint plus control motivation model (Fiske & Morling, 1996) predict that anxiety causes people to form more stereotypic impressions of others. Affect-as-information (Schwarz & Clore, 1983) and affect-priming (Bower, 1991) theories predict that anxiety causes people to form affect-congruent (i.e., more threatening) impressions of others. A novel research paradigm was used in Experiment 1 to separate the predictions of these two classes of theories, recognizing that their predictions were not mutually exclusive. Experiment 1 found that anxious persons formed more threatening, but not more stereotypic, impressions of a target person. This result replicated in Experiment 2, with a different population and a different anxiety manipulation. In addition, Experiment 2 found that the anxiety-congruent bias in impression formation was limited to participants? ratings of traits that corresponded to the information presented about the target. The results of Experiments 1 and 2 were taken as support for an affect-priming rather than affect-as-information account of the effect of anxiety on impression formation. Experiments 3 and 4 investigated anxiety effects on encoding and recall that underlie affect-priming explanation of affect-congruent impression judgment biases. Experiment 3 found that anxious participants spent more time encoding non-stereotypic information and recalled less stereotypic information than non-anxious participants. In Experiment 4 anxious participants again recalled less stereotypic information. This study also found that anxious participants? recall and impression judgments were affect-congruent. ... As predicted by the modified affect-as-information theory, the affect-attribution manipulation left participants? anxiety levels unaltered but it did attenuate the anxiety-congruent impression bias. In addition, anxious participants in this study recalled less stereotypic than non-stereotypic information. The findings of this thesis raised several new questions and theoretical challenges. The new experimental paradigms that were used to examine the questions in this thesis will also allow the examination of the interplay of stereotypes and valence in judgments in future research for persons in affective states other than anxiety. Such research would allow for the continued revision and development of theories of affect and social cognition.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Ohio State University, 2008. / Title from first page of PDF file. Includes bibliographical references (p. 142-152).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Rutgers University, 2008. / "Graduate Program in Literatures in English." Includes bibliographical references (p. 200-205).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--State University of New York at Binghamton, Department of Comparative Literature, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis--Auburn University, 2009. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (p. 64-77).

Thesis (M.S.W.)--Smith College School for Social Work, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 155-161).

Thesis (Psy. D.)--Wheaton College, 2007. / Abstract. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 54-61).