THE IMPACT OF EMOTIONAL ADVERTISING APPEALS ON CONSUMER IMPLICIT AND EXPLICIT MEMORY: AN ACCESSIBILITY/DIAGNOSTICITY PERSPECTIVE

Patti Williams The Wharton School

University of Pennsylvania

May 2000

Rough working draft. Please do not quote without author’s permission.

Patti Williams is Assistant Professor of Marketing at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, 1400 Steinberg/Dietrich Hall, Philadelphia, PA 19104 Thanks to Carol Scott, Jennifer Aaker, Bob Bjork, Gavan Fitzsimons, Debbie MacInnis and Don Morrison for their generous donations of time and support to my dissertation research, upon which this paper is based. Special thanks to Jennifer for her insight and editing skills in creating this version of the paper. This research was funded in part by the Procter and Gamble Marketing Innovation Fund. Particular thanks to Chris Allen for his efforts in facilitating my relationship with P & G.

Abstract

Emotional advertisements have a substantial impact on consumer attitudes, as well as upon purchase

intentions. However, research on the influence of emotional appeals on memory has been somewhat mixed,

with some researchers asserting that they result in poor consumer memory, while others argue that if tested

properly, they have a substantial impact. The current research addresses these mixed results by relying on an

accessibility/diagnosticity framework to explore the effect of emotions on consumer implicit and explicit

memory. Explicit memory performance is characterized as relying upon both the accessibility of memory

traces and their relative diagnosticity in contrast with other inputs. In contrast, implicit memory performance

is primarily driven by accessibility alone.

Results from two experiments are supportive of this perspective. The first experiment demonstrates

that overall emotional advertising appeals have a bigger impact on implicit versus explicit memory

performance, though explicit memory performance is enhanced after exposure to an intense emotional

appeal. The second experiment demonstrates that the diagnosticity of emotional appeals can be enhanced,

and that such enhancement leads to better explicit memory performance under conditions of high

involvement. In contrast, emotional diagnosticity is shown to have no effect on consumer implicit memory.

INTRODUCTION

Emotional or “feeling” advertising appeals have received considerable attention over the past decade

in consumer behavior research. Past research has focused on the specific types of emotional appeals

frequently used (Stayman, Aaker and Bruzzone 1989), as well as the effects of emotional appeals on

consumer advertisement and brand attitudes, as well as purchase intentions (e.g., Burke and Edell 1987, Batra

and Ray 1986). However, research examining the impact of emotional advertising appeals on more cognitive-

based effects such as consumer memory has been somewhat mixed; some researchers have shown that the

use of emotion of persuasion appeals results in poor consumer memory (e.g., Zielske 1982), while others

argue that if tested properly, emotions may have a substantial effect on memory (e.g., Friestad and Thorson

1993). As a result, the impact of emotions on memory in persuasion contexts is not clearly understood.

The objective of this research is to address these mixed results by relying on an accessibility-

diagnosticity model (Feldman and Lynch 1987) to explore the impact of emotions on both implicit and

explicit memory. Thus far, research has focused upon measuring explicit memory for emotional

advertisements, ignoring their potential impact upon consumers’ implicit memory (Schacter 1987). However,

while emotional traces stored in memory may be accessible, they may not be particularly diagnostic when

consumers engage in the effortful, strategic searches of memory necessary for explicit memory performance,

and thus may be “outshone” by other cues (Smith 1988). In contrast, however, these traces may have a

substantial impact upon implicit memory, which requires no assessments of diagnosticity, instead relying

entirely upon accessibility. Moreover, researchers have argued that emotional experiences might often be

more implicit or unconscious in nature (Kihlstrom 1993), which suggests, in accordance with the encoding

specificity principle, that investigations of the effects of such ads on implicit memory may shed light on

previously conflicting results by tapping into the unconscious effects of emotions on memory.

This paper reports the outcome of two experiments designed to investigate the potential impact of

emotional advertising appeals upon consumer implicit versus explicit memory. The first experiment explores

the impact of advertising appeals of varying degrees of emotional intensity upon both implicit and explicit

memory. Experiment 2 extends these results, investigating the degree to which the diagnosticity of intense

emotional experiences can be heightened, via relevance of an emotional appeal to the advertised product, thus

improving consumer explicit memory for emotional persuasion appeals, particularly under conditions of high

involvement.

ADVERTISING APPEALS AND THE USE OF EMOTIONi

As a result of calls to give greater attention to emotional and experiential aspects of consumer

behavior (Zajonc 1980, Holbrook and Hirschman 1982), the importance of affective responses to

advertisements, and their impact upon both attitudes and choice processes has become increasingly clear. A

large number of advertisements can be characterized by their emotional aspects (Stayman, Aaker and

Bruzzone 1989), and emotional responses are central to consumers’ perceptions of and reactions to

advertisements (Aaker and Bruzzone 1981). Much of this research has focused on psychological theories of

affective experience to determine the types of emotions that may be evoked in persuasion appeals. For

example, one common finding in both the basic emotion literature which focuses on emotional responses to

general stimuli (e.g., Izard 1977; Mehrabian and Russell 1974; Plutchik 1980) and the emotion literature in

consumer behavior which focuses on emotional responses to advertising appeals Batra and Ray (1986; Burke

and Edell 1989; Edell and Burke 1987; Mehrabian and Russell 1974), is that three general types of emotional

responses exist. Two of the emotional responses appear to be positive (one typified by more arousing

emotions such as surprise, elation and joy, and the other by more soothing emotions such as warmth, hope

and gentleness), while the third is negative.

Based on these specific emotional responses, researchers have focused on the types of consequences

that they yield. Batra and Ray (1986), for example, expanded the traditional coding of thought protocols to

include not only cognitive responses to appeals (Wright 1973), but emotional responses. Importantly, these

emotional responses accounted for significant levels of variance in advertisement attitudes, over and above

that provided by the traditional cognitive responses. Further, such emotional responses can also directly

impact brand attitudes and purchase intentions (e.g., Stayman and Aaker 1988, Edell and Burke 1987, Burke

and Edell 1989).

Importantly, in this literature stream, a distinction has been made between emotions depicted in the

advertisement and those actually felt by the consumer viewing the advertisement (Aaker and Stayman 1989).

While depicted and felt emotions often coincide, there are also conditions in which they are discrete, such as

in the case of upbeat emotional responses (Stout, Homer and Liu 1990). In contrast, depicted and felt

emotions tend to be highly related in the case of warm emotional responses (e.g., depicted relaxed emotions

are highly correlated with felt relaxed emotions; Burke and Edell 1987). This variation in the level of

correspondence between the constructs may have to do with differences in arousal. Relative to warm

emotional responses, upbeat emotional responses tend to be more highly arousing. In such conditions, the

cognitive appraisal processes may be more likely to be distinct from the actual emotional experience (Lazarus

1982)

. Conversely, in conditions where the emotional experience is characterized by low levels of arousal, the

cognitive appraisal processes may be quite similar to the actual experience. In this research, we focus on

conditions where depicted and felt emotions highly correspond, but the construct of most interest is felt or

experienced emotions.

The Impact of Emotional Advertising Appeals on Consumer Memory

While previous work has demonstrated the importance of emotional responses upon advertising

effectiveness as conceptualized by attitudes and purchase intentions, advertising practitioners are often

interested in other measures of advertising effectiveness, such as recall (Lynch and Srull 1982, Krishnan and

Chakravarti 1993). In this domain, the impact of “feeling” advertisements is much less clear. A number of

researchers have found that emotional advertisements often do not perform well on measures such as day-after

recall (Zielske 1982), suggesting that emotional responses evoked by advertisements are poor retrieval cues

compared to cognitive responses, and resulting in widespread practitioner belief that emotional commercials do

poorly in standard memory tests (Berger 1981). In contrast, others have shown that emotional advertisements

do have a recall advantage, at least under retrieval conditions which encourage search of episodic memory

(Friestad and Thorson 1986, 1993, Thorson and Friestad 1989, Thorson and Page 1988). Asserting that

advertisements are encoded into episodic memory (i.e., the mental storage of personal experiences and their

spatial and temporal context), with a trace that can be strengthened via the experience of emotional arousal,

they show that the typical semantic retrieval cues (i.e. product category cues) contained in the customary cued

recall measures are generally inappropriate, and lead to poor recall performance for emotional appeals. In

contrast, free recall, an episodic memory task, as well as the use of executional or experiential cues (i.e., “Recall

the ad that featured the grandfather playing with his grandson.”) appear to lead to faster, higher recall for

emotional advertisements (Friestad and Thorson 1986, 1993). However, even in this body of work, the impact

of emotional advertising appeals on consumer memory has been somewhat unreliable (Page, Thorson and

Heide 1990).

The apparently inconsistent impact of emotional advertisements upon consumer memory implies

that the role of feelings in memory may not be appropriately conceptualized. Nearly all of the previous work

on this topic has conceptualized emotional responses stored in memory as available to the conscious or

intentional retrieval processes tapped by traditional, explicit measures of memory. However, examination of

a wide variety of studies investigating emotional memory suggests that while emotional responses are encoded

into memory, and thus potentially accessible for explicit retrieval, they may not always be considered

diagnostic in such explicit searches (Feldman and Lynch 1988). In addition, it may be that feelings evoked in

response to advertisements are much less conscious, and thus more implicit in nature (Zajonc 1980,

Kihlstrom 1993). If true, this would suggest that one key to disentangling these inconsistent results may lie in

determining the relative impact of emotional appeals on implicit memory relative to explicit memory.

IMPLICIT MEMORY AND EMOTION

Comparing Implicit and Explicit Memory

Information processing models of human memory have traditionally relied upon memory models

and tasks which presuppose that individuals have conscious access to the contents of a long-term memory

store (Lynch and Srull 1982). Thus free recall, cued recall and recognition have been the predominant

methods used to assess memory performance. Each of these tasks makes direct reference to, and indeed

requires, conscious recollection of a specific learning episode during a particular time period. For example, to

answer these types of questions about advertisements previously seen, a respondent would be required to

consciously think back over those appeals seen in the target time period and develop an intentional, strategic

search strategy to retrieve the memory traces associated with the relevant appeals.

Over the past decade, however, a large literature has grown which demonstrates that much

information stored in memory is not available to such conscious retrieval, but is instead more implicit in

nature, and is thus accessed unconsciously or automatically rather than consciously or strategically (Schacter

1987). This finding has led to a distinction between the traditional conceptualizations of memory, classified

as explicit memory, and the newer conceptualizations, implicit memory. Explicit memory refers to the

conscious awareness of material and an intention to remember it, and is typically measured by free or cued

recall and recognition tasks. In contrast, implicit memory refers to the effects of a previous learning episode

that are expressed without awareness or intention to remember, and is typically measured by tasks such as

stem or word fragment completion and category associate generation (Bjork and Richardson-Klavehn 1988,

Schacter 1987), as well as via preference judgments (e.g., Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc 1980).ii One point merits

noting, however; the relative infancy of this research domain has led to a proliferation of terms to describe

these memory processes (e.g, unaware-aware, unconscious-conscious, intuitive-analytic, direct-indirect,

procedural-declarative, automatic-controlled), as well as a difficulty in separating the conceptual meaning of

the constructs from their measurement (for a review, see Bjork and Richardson-Klavehn 1988). In the

present research, the terms, implicit and explicit, are used for the memory processes, while the measures for

each will be referred to as direct and indirect, respectively. Specifically, direct tests are those in which the

instructions at the time of test make reference to a target event in the personal history of the subject, while

indirect tests refer only to the task at hand, making no reference to prior events.iii

Implicit memory effects were first observed in experiments with amnesics, who often could not

remember specific events but who nonetheless exhibited behavioral or other changes consistent with the

outcomes of these specific encounters, such as the ability to perform certain new skills despite no

recollection of the episodes during which these skills were learned (Schacter 1987). Identification of this

phenomenon led to studies with normal participants, primarily focusing on “repetition priming” in various

perceptual tasks. These experiments demonstrate that exposure to a target can impact subsequent tasks

involving those targets, such as word fragment or word stem completion (e.g., Graf, Mandler and Haden

1982), word identification (e.g., Jacoby and Dallas 1981) and lexical decisions (e.g., Scarborough, Gerard and

Cortese 1979). The presentation of the target stimulus is said to “prime” the perceptual representation of

that stimulus in memory, regardless of the participants’ ability to recall the previous presentation.

Importantly, manipulations long known to impact explicit recall, such as elaborative processing, have

no effect upon implicit memory at the perceptual level (Jacoby and Dallas 1981). In fact, the traditional levels-

of-processing hierarchy of effects (Craik and Lockhart 1972) is reversed for perceptual implicit memory, with

low-levels of processing resulting in greater implicit perceptual memory benefits, while high-levels of elaborative

processing result in little or no benefits. Other dissociations between implicit and explicit memory have been

identified as well, including the attenuation of priming effects (Jacoby and Dallas 1981), minimal impact of

interference in priming (Graf and Schacter 1987), and stochastic independence between performance on implicit

and explicit tests (Eich 1984). Further, researchers have expanded the domain of implicit memory phenomena

to include conceptual-level effects. For example, while perceptually-based processing facilitates word-fragment

completion, elaborative processing increases the degree to which correct answers are given in response to

general knowledge questions (Roediger, Srinivas and Weldon 1989). Similarly, elaborative processing of word

targets increase the accessibility of category words associated with that trait (Smith and Branscombe 1989).

Thus, implicit memory appears to exist for both perceptual and for conceptual information, where the latter is

typically measured by the priming of general knowledge and/or category membership.

Recently, consideration of implicit memory has had broader impact outside the cognitive psychology

realm. For example, the role of implicit memory in social psychological phenomena has been examined by

focusing on the implicit use of stereotypes (Banaji and Greenwald 1994), the biased interpretation of

ambiguous trait information (Bargh and Pietromonaco 1982), and the impact of mood on evaluations

(Schwarz and Clore 1983). Importantly, this research stream has also expanded the repertoire of indirect

measures to include response latencies, with the implication that the use of implicit, unintentional memory

should be faster than more strategic, explicit use of memory (Fazio et al, 1986, Bargh et al, 1992).

In the consumer behavior domain, implicit memory effects have also been gaining attention. For

example, Nedungadi (1990) used both fragment completion and category listing tasks to assess brand priming

effects. Krishnan and Chakravarti (1993) highlighted the potential importance of implicit memory on brand

equity. Others have examined the impact of mere exposure to advertising stimuli to enhance brand

evaluations without recall of the original presentation (Lee 1995), and have replicated the effects of

processing type, word-frequency, name awareness and repetition and levels of processing found in the

cognitive psychology literature for advertising based brand recall (Lee 1995, Krishnan and Shapiro 1996).

However, while this stream has made early progress in understanding the effects of implicit memory

in the cognitive realm of consumer behavior, very little is known about its potential effects on the processing

of emotions and the more general effects of emotional appeals. In this research, we attempt to address this

gap in an attempt to provide theoretical progress toward understanding the impact of emotions on memory.

The premise put forth is that the mixed memory results found in the emotion and persuasion literature may

lie in diagnosticity of the emotional cues in aiding memory.

The Accessibility and Diagnosticity Framework and its the Implications for Implicit Memory

The accessibility/diagnosticity framework (Feldman and Lynch 1988; Lynch, Marmorstein and

Weigold 1988) hypothesizes that information contained in memory is only used to the extent that it is

relatively more accessible in memory than is other information, and is perceived as more diagnostic than

information that is equally accessible. Accessibility is defined as the degree to which information can be

retrieved from memory, while diagnosticity refers to the perception that a single piece of information

available in memory is adequate to perform a task. In tests of cued recall or recognition, highly diagnostic

cues (e.g., product category membership cues) are given to respondents as part of the memory test itself (e.g.,

“Do you recall any advertisements for toothpaste?”). In such cases, it is unlikely that participants

intentionally search for or use the relatively weaker emotional cues contained in long-term memory (Smith

1988, Bower 1981). In contrast, in free recall, participants must create their own intentional search strategies,

making the use of emotional cues more likely. However, even with free recall as the measure, mixed results

often occur, suggesting that even in this type of task, participants very often find their way to other, self-

generated cues that may be more diagnostic than those presented by emotions (Tobias, Kihlstrom and

Schacter 1992).

Examining the impact of more rational, cognitive advertisements on consumer memory adds support

for this perspective. The use of explicit memory is an intentional, strategic process, facilitated by elaborative

processing at the time of encoding. A variety of experiments have found that while cognitive appeals result in

higher recall under conditions of high elaboration, emotional appeals, which tend to be characterized as

peripheral in nature and low in diagnosticity compared with rational appeals, do not (Cacioppo and Petty

1982). As use of explicit memory is in itself involving, it is not surprising that those elements of a message

deemed most diagnostic under conditions of high involvement also lead to higher levels of explicit memory.

Indeed, principles of encoding specificity and transfer-appropriate-processing (Roediger 1990) suggest that

this overlap between processing of central cues under conditions of high involvement and higher explicit

memory for advertisements containing those cues is natural. Similarly, the lack of diagnosticity of the weaker

emotional cues is not surprising. As they tend to not be processed as elaborately, they are unlikely to serve as

diagnostic cues under the conditions which most favor explicit memory performance. This might be

interpreted to imply that emotional advertisements would result in enhanced explicit memory under

conditions of low involvement. However, even then, emotional cues may be relatively weak compared to

product category or other cues also available, as even peripheral or heuristic cues vary in perceived reliability

(Eagly and Chaiken 1993). Emotional cues are, however, likely to be accessible in memory if emotional

responses to an advertisement or other stimulus have occurred. An over-reliance on explicit memory effects

may thus lead to under-estimation of the potential impact of emotional appeals on consumer memory.

The examination of the impact of emotional appeals on implicit memory may yield greater insights,

as importantly, the use of implicit memory does not call for assessments of diagnosticity. Such assessments

necessarily implicate intentionality and a strategic search of and use of memory, and are thus highly relevant

to tests of explicit memory. The use of implicit memory, however, relies solely upon relative accessibility of

existing knowledge structures in memory. If a knowledge structure is primed, reflecting implicit memory for

a previous exposure, that heightened accessibility will reveal itself on indirect tests (Graf and Mandler 1984).

Emotional information encoded into memory may heighten the accessibility of relevant emotional nodes, and

via spreading of activation, other information linked to it. Thus indirect tests of memory may reveal effects

of emotional experience, whereas with direct tests may be overridden by considerations of diagnosticity,

reducing the impact of emotional information. Consistent with this perspective, the impact of feelings on

judgment is believed to decrease as the amount or salience of competing information increases (Clore,

Schwarz and Conway 1994). Similarly, affect impacts evaluations of unfamiliar brands, when no other

relevant information is available, but not that of familiar brands, when presumably consumers have other

relevant information to consider (Srull 1983). Likewise, Ellis (1985) has found that mood effects on memory

are most likely to occur when processing is impoverished or incidental, that is, when the availability of other

cues potentially more diagnostic is low. Further, Friestad and Thorson (1993) have shown that consumers

are most likely to show effects of emotional advertisements on memory under conditions of free recall than

when product category cues are used to facilitate memory. Again, this product category information is likely

to outshine the weaker emotional information encoded with the advertisement during the original

presentation. However, executionally-cued recall strategies do enhance memory for these emotional

advertisements, suggesting that these types of questions make emotional cues more diagnostic than do the

product category cued recall questions.

The Implicit Nature of Emotional Experience

Besides issues of diagnosticity, a number of researchers have asserted that emotional responses may

be relatively implicit in nature, further supporting the importance of investigating their potential memory

effects within the domain of implicit rather than explicit memory. Emotional reactions are often assumed to

reflect an underlying implicit appraisal process by which events are evaluated (Clore, Schwarz and Conway

1994, for a review). Thus, emotions may be an intrinsic, yet relatively unnoticed feature of an environment or

episode. The view in cognitive psychology is often that emotions are part of the environmental context, and

thus only contiguous to conscious experience rather than an integral part of it. Nonetheless they are

incorporated, along with other aspects of the situation, into a unitary memory representation (cf. Macaulay,

Ryan and Eich 1993). Thus, many emotional reactions may not be consciously mediated, but may occur

spontaneously and implicitly in reaction to some stimulus. If emotional reactions are indeed more implicit in

nature, both the encoding specificity principle and theories of transfer appropriate processing would suggest

that their effects on memory should be conceptualized implicitly as well (Roediger 1980).

Zajonc (1980) has made persuasive arguments that much affect requires no cognition, prior to the

consciousness. For example, research on mere exposure has directly linked implicit memory to affect, though

the focus has been on the affective outcomes of implicit memory effects, rather than the implicit use of

emotional information encoded into memory. This work has demonstrated that both liminal and subliminal

exposure to a target stimulus can result in more positive evaluations of that stimulus, regardless of

participants’ awareness of the stimulus, demonstrating that implicit memory can be a more sensitive gauge of

past experience than explicit memory (Kunst-Wilson and Zajonc 1980). Kihlstrom (1993) furthers this

argument, suggesting that both emotions and cognitions often occur unconsciously, and that neither are likely

to receive the activation necessary to bring them to consciousness unless they are somehow connected with

the self, and thus worthy of additional allocation of mental resources.

While emotional associations between a brand and its advertising may be accessible under conditions

of explicit memory, they are likely to be relatively weak cues, compared to other experimenter-generated cues

in tests of cued recall or recognition, and perhaps even to other subject-generated cues under tests of free

recall. As a result of this impaired diagnosticity, examination of implicit memory may result in a more

accurate representation of the impact that emotional advertisements can have on long-term memory.

Moreover, emotional experience may often be relatively implicit in nature, occurring prior to conscious

awareness and cognitive activity, making the application of tests of implicit memory even more relevant to the

investigation of these effects.

H1: Emotional advertising appeals will lead to enhanced consumer implicit (versus explicit) memory.

Clearly, however, consciously experienced emotional reactions are frequent, and evidence for

emotional impact on memory has been found. Thus, it is important to consider the factors that account for

the differences among emotional experiences. For example, intense affective experiences are more likely to

be recalled explicitly than are mild ones, even after a 24 hour delay (Hardin and Banaji 1990). Intense affect

presumably heightens an individual’s arousal, increasing attention to and elaboration of those experiences.

Thus, arousal at encoding produces better memory for related information after delay, while match in arousal

at encoding and retrieval produces better memory for affectively neutral information (Clark et al, 1983).

These results support the hypothesis that increased intensity of emotional experience at the time of encoding

will promote the arousal conditions that contribute to conscious elaboration and thereby lead to explicit

memory benefits.

However, emotional experiences are likely to enter consciousness under conditions of adequate

intensity. This intensity is likely to draw attention to the emotional experience, thereby prompting greater

elaboration upon the experience and encouraging the creation of a memory trace that will be stronger and

thus perhaps more diagnostic under conditions of explicit memory use. Thus, very intense emotional appeals

will have a greater impact upon explicit memory, while mild emotional appeals will not. In addition, intensity

of emotion should enhance the accessibility of the emotional trace, thus benefiting implicit memory as well.

However, it is expected that increased intensity will have a greater impact upon explicit memory than upon

implicit memory, as the former will benefit not only from an increase in accessibility per se but from an

increase in elaboration as well.

H2: Intense (versus mild) emotional advertisements will enhance both consumer explicit and implicit memory, with a greater effect upon explicit than upon implicit memory.

While the presentation of emotional advertisements is expected to enhance the accessibility of the

target brand name featured in the advertisements, it may at the same time lessen the relative accessibility of

other brands in the same category. For example, Alba and Chattopadhyay (1986) found that increasing the

salience (accessibility) of one brand in memory reduced the accessibility of alternative brands, including those

that would otherwise be candidates for potential purchase. Thus, as the accessibility of the target brand is

increased via exposure to emotional advertisements, the accessibility of other major brands in the category is

expected to decrease.

H3: As the accessibility of one brand name in memory increases, the accessibility of other brands in the category will decrease.

EXPERIMENT 1

Overview

Experiment 1 is a 2 (Emotional Strength: Intense versus Mild) by 2 (Memory Task: Indirect versus

Direct) full-factorial between subjects design. The indirect measure of memory used is a conceptual priming

task while the direct measure is a cued recall question. As the various memory measures are sensitive to prior

measurement (Schacter, Bowers and Booker 1989), this between subjects collection is necessary. The primary

dependent variable is individual participants’ successful memory performance on the memory task they are

asked to complete. In addition, brand and advertisement attitude measures and thought and feeling protocols

are also taken.

Method

Undergraduate students (N = 149; 85 female) from an East Coast University required to complete

market research experiments for class credit participated in this experiment. They were first asked to

complete demographic questions and then to review a mock magazine entitled Grad Life, ostensibly aimed at

graduate students. Participants were told this was a magazine developed by a group of MBA entrepreneurial

students considering launching it as a publication in the near future. Before making that launch decision,

however, the entrepreneurs wanted feedback from current and future graduate students about its content and

general interest in such a publication. Subjects were asked to review all aspects of the magazine including the

content, advertisements, layout and design and to provide their opinions of it in a questionnaire that would

follow.

The mock magazine consisted of ten pages: A cover page and table of contents, three pages of

editorial copy (on the subjects of health, weekend getaways and web site reviews), and five pages of

advertising. The target advertisement was repeated twiceiv, always on the fifth and ninth pages. In addition

to the target advertisement, the magazine also contained a full-page appeal for American Express Student

Card services, a half-page ad for MCI Long Distance services and a one-half page ad for Hewlett Packard

computers. To avoid drawing undue attention to the target advertisement, the ads for American Express was

also repeated twice. The entire magazine was printed in full color and was encased in plastic sheet covers.

Immediately after reviewing the magazine, participants completed a short questionnaire consistent

with the cover story including several questions about the articles that appeared in the magazine, as well as

potential additional topics ostensibly under consideration for future issues. Subjects then completed a 15-

minute unrelated filler task. Immediately following that task was a single sheet of paper which included either

the implicit or explicit memory task (described below) and probed for suspicion regarding the connection

between that task and the previously viewed magazine. Unless specifically mentioned in the memory task,

this page included no references to the Grad Life magazine study. After completing another 10-minute

unrelated filler task, subjects were given a final survey that asked additional questions consistent with the

experimental cover story. In addition, it assessed target brand and advertisement attitudes, collected open-

ended thought and feeling protocols and included a manipulation check on emotional reactions to the target

appeal.

Independent Variables

Emotional Strength. Warmth, defined as “a positive, mild, volatile emotion, involving

physiological arousal and precipitated by experiencing directly or vicariously a love, family or friendship

relationship” (Aaker, Stayman and Hagerty 1986), was chosen as the emotion of focus for several reasons.

First, in the emotion literature, dimensions resembling warmth are often predominant (e.g., Batra and Ray

1986, Burke and Edell 1987). Moreover, warm advertising appeals are common, accounting in some studies

for nearly 20% of all appeals (Stayman, Aaker and Bruzzone 1989) and warm emotional responses have been

found to be commonly evoked among advertising viewers (Burke and Edell 1987, Batra and Ray 1986). In

addition, felt and depicted warm emotional responses tend to be highly correlated, thereby reducing this

difference as a potential confound (Stout, Homer and Liu 1990). To reduce potential confounds and noise,

print advertisements were used. As a result the primary manipulation of warmth in the advertisements was

color photographs.

Examination of the warmth literature, as well as a pretest with 50 participants provided guidance in

stimuli creation. Warmth was executionally created taking a photograph of a young couple seated together in

a warm, sun-washed location. Intensity of the evoked emotion was manipulated through three factors

(Vanden Abeele and Machlachlan 1994): (1) eye contact between the two models (looking at each other

versus looking at the camera), (2) their physical closeness (close together versus farther apart), and (3) color

tones in the photos (orange and yellow tones versus blue and green tones). A second pretest (N = 18, 9

female) was then conducted to identify one relatively intense and one mildly warm photograph from the set

of eight photos. Participants were asked to indicate the degree to which they experienced a particular emotion

while viewing each photograph (where 1 = not at all; 7 = very intensely). Drawn from Burke and Edell

(1987), 52 emotions were measured (12 warm emotions, Cronbach’s alphawarm = .84; 26 upbeat emotions

Cronbach’s alphaupbeat = .97; 14 negative emotions, Cronbach’s alphanegative = .87). The results indicated our

photographs evoked significantly more warm than upbeat and negative felt emotions (ps < .005). The two

photos chosen were one that evoked the most intense feelings of warmth (m = 5.76) and another that evoked

mild warm responses (m = 3.27, p < .001).

Next, the advertisements were created. Film was chosen because it is a familiar product category, and

one that makes the use of the photographic manipulation relevant. Further, it is classified as neither a

strongly “feeling” product nor a strongly “thinking” product (m = 2.93 out of 7), and as moderately involving

(m = 4.95 out of 7; Ratchford 1987). Based on pretest resultsv, advertising copy was created, focusing on

“weak” attributes possessed by the film. In this way, some copy is provided for participants to read and later

answer questions about, but the copy maintains the status of the ad as one that is primarily emotional with

relatively little rational content. The film advertisement, which was for an unfamiliar yet real brand, Agfa

film,vi featured a headline, the photograph, copy, a tagline and a logo.

Memory Measures. Two memory measures, one indirect (conceptual priming) and one direct (cued

recall) were collected between subjects. Conceptual priming was assessed via generation of category

membership, where the measure of interest is inclusion of Agfa in the list of film category members (“As

quickly as possible, please list all the brands of film you can think of.”). Inclusion of the dominant brands,

Kodak and Fuji, was also measured, consistent with Hypothesis 3. Explicit memory was assessed via a direct

memory measure in the form of a cued recall question which asked participants to recall the brand of film

they saw advertised in the magazine (“The magazine you viewed earlier, Grad Life, featured an ad for a brand

of film. Please write the name of that brand of film in the space below.”). In addition to brand name

memory, all participants were asked to recall as much as they could from the target advertisement in an open-

ended question.

Finally, it should be noted that, in addition to the primary data collection, a second group of

participants (N = 35) was asked to complete the conceptual priming measure, without exposure to the target

advertisement. This group thus served as the baseline standard against which those exposed to the target are

compared. Nine percent (3 subjects) of this control group included Agfa on their list of film brands.

Dependent Variables

Successful Memory Performance. The primary dependent variable in this study is successful

memory performance. Provision of the target brand name, Agfa, in response to the memory question asked

in each condition will be counted as a success.

Brand and Advertisement Attitudes. Participants were asked to complete a series of measures to

assess their attitudes toward both the target advertisement and the target brand. Four questions measured

both brand and advertisement attitudes (where 1 = bad, not at all likable, negative, unfavorable; 7 = good,

likable, positive, favorable). An average of these responses led to a four-item advertisement attitude index

(Cronbach’s alpha = .95) and a four-item brand attitude index (Cronbach’s alpha = .96).

Cognitive and Emotional Responses. Subjects were asked to describe any thoughts or feelings

they had during exposure to the target ads. The order of the thought and feeling protocol questions was

counterbalanced between participants. Two independent raters categorized cognitive and emotional

responses to the target advertisements. Both coders were trained in cognitive and emotional response

analysis and were given a series of examples of each thought and feeling type. Both raters coded a common

set of examples similarly and were encouraged to ask any questions of clarification during subsequent coding

(Brislin 1980). Adopted from Wright (1973), cognitive responses were coded in terms of positive (i.e, “The ad

was sweet.”), negative (i.e., “It was very uninviting.”) and neutral thoughts (i.e., “The ad was in color.”) about

the advertisement and about the brand (i.e., positive: “I thought I should buy that film next time”; negative:

“Agfa is a stupid name for a brand”; neutral: “I’ve never heard of that brand of film.”). Irrelevant thoughts

(thoughts that were theoretically meaningless, i.e., “Film developing costs too much.”) were also coded.

Drawing on Batra and Ray (1986) and Burke and Edell (1987), emotional responses were coded into

three categories: Warm emotional responses (as defined above, e.g.,, “The ad was sweet and made me feel

emotional.”), upbeat emotional responses (Feelings of excitement, energy or active joy, e.g., “It gave me a

strong feeling of happiness.”) and negative emotional responses (Feelings of unhappiness, sadness, anger, or

boredom, e.g.,, “The picture of the loving couple made me feel lonely.”). Other unrelated emotional

responses were also coded (e.g., “The ad made me feel confused:). Inter-rater agreement was high (90%).

When disagreements occurred, the raters were instructed to discuss their differences until a consensus was

reached, a process which required less than a minute of discussion.

Results

Typical memory experiments in the cognitive psychology literature test memory for a battery of

items, and thus the dependent variable of interest is percentage of successful memory performance on the

total list of potential items. In our experiments, however, memory is tested for a single brand name, and the

dependent measure is thus successful or unsuccessful memory performance for the single item on each type

of memory task. This dependent variable is thus a dichotomous variable, and as a result, the standard

ANOVA analysis is inappropriate. Instead, a more general linear model provides the basis for the analysis,

which permits the flexibility to incorporate both binary and continuous dependent variables. This type of

analysis allows for a clear distinction between independent and dependent variables and is a natural extension

of the usual ANOVA approach for continuous data, thus allowing for the easy exploration of both main and

interaction effects.vii All hypotheses were tested in a 2 (Emotional Intensity: Mild vs. Strong) by 2 (Memory

Task: Indirect vs. Direct) between subjects analysis.

Manipulation Checks. A manipulation check on the emotions experienced in response to the

target advertisements indicates that both the mild and emotional advertising appeals evoked warm emotions

as intended. Participants completed a ten-item emotional response scale based upon Burke and Edell (1987)

that asked them to indicate the degree to which they experienced five upbeat (joyfulness, energetic, inspired,

excited, happy; Cronbach’s alpha = .91) and five warm (warm, sentimental, moved, emotional, hopeful;

Cronbach’s alpha = .93) emotions in response to the target advertisement (where 1 = did not experience

emotion at all, 7 = experienced the emotion very strongly). The average upbeat response was subtracted

from the average warm response to assess the degree to which the two appeals evoked more warm than

upbeat emotions. Both appeals evoked significantly more warm than upbeat feelings (ps < .05). Further, a

one-way ANOVA (df = 1, 148) on the impact of intensity of emotional appeal indicates that the intense

versus the mild emotional appeal evoked significantly greater feelings of warmth (m = 5.44 vs. 3.73; F =

14.82, p < .01), as intended.

As noted previously, 9% of a control group not exposed to the target appeals included the target

brand, Agfa, in response to the conceptual priming indirect memory task. In this experiment, 24% of

subjects who received this task included Agfa in response to this question. Thus a significant amount of

priming occurred over the base rate (Chi-Square = 132.57, p < .01), indicating significant implicit memory

benefits resulting from the exposure to the target emotional appeal.

Subjects in both memory conditions were asked to indicate what they thought the purpose of the

memory question they completed might be. Consistent with Schacter, Bowers and Booker (1989), this

question served as a check on the degree to which those subjects in the indirect memory task condition were

aware of the link between the memory questions and their previous exposure to the target advertisement, and

thus to what extent they may have relied upon conscious recollection of that appeal when completing the

task. Five subjects in the indirect task condition correctly related the task to the advertisement they had

previously seen and were eliminated from the data set.viii As the cued recall question directly referred back to

the target appeals, it is not surprising that every subject in the direct task condition made the connection

between the two tasks.

Memory Performance. Overall, performance on the indirect memory task (m = .64) outstripped

that on the direct memory task (m = .57), supporting Hypothesis 1 (Chi-square = 2.64, p < .05). Analysis also

indicates a significant main effect of emotional intensity (mintense = .73, mmild = .50; Chi-square = 10.21, p < .01)

on memory performance. This is qualified, in partial support of Hypothesis 2, by a significant interaction

(Chi-square = 9.68, p < .01) between emotional intensity and memory task such that while intensity of

emotional experience significantly benefited performance on the direct memory task (mmild = .34, mintense = .79),

it had no significant effect on the indirect memory task (mmild = .60, mintense = .67; see Figure 1). These results

indicate that intensity of emotional experience had a significant effect on explicit memory, as presumably it is

brought into consciousness and thus is more available for subsequent intentional retrieval. Intensity does not

appear to have a significant effect upon implicit memory, however, though the means on the indirect memory

task are directionally consistent with a greater accessibility of the more intense emotional experience in

memory.

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Finally, Hypothesis 3 examined the extent to which priming the target brand name might inhibit

implicit memory performance for the dominant brands in the category. To measure this effect, successful

memory performance in the implicit memory conditions for both Kodak and Fuji, the major film brands in

the U.S. was coded. Analysis indicates that with greater emotional strength of the target appeal, Kodak and

Fuji became less accessible for participants, supporting Hypothesis 3. Significant main effects of emotional

strength were found in analyses of the memory performance for both brands (Kodak Chi-square = 9.22, p <

.01; Fuji Chi-square = 10.01, p < .01). While all participants recalled Kodak after viewing the mild emotional

appeal, just 74% listed Kodak after exposure to the intense appeal. Similarly, 96% included Fuji after the mild

appeal, while 63% did so after the intense appeal.

Attitudes. Participant attitudes toward the advertisement and the brand were analyzed via a one-way

ANOVA (Emotional Strength: Intense versus Mild; df = 1, 148). Participants expressed more favorable

attitudes toward the intense emotional appeal (m = 4.48) compared to the mild emotional appeal (m = 3.84, F

= 5.86, p< .02). As shown in Table 1, there were no differences in attitudes toward the brand (F < 1).

---------------------------------------- Insert Table 1 about here.

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Cognitive and Emotional Responses. Advertisement effects on subjects’ thoughts and feelings

were analyzed via a one-way ANOVA (Emotional Strength: Intense versus Mild; df = 1, 148). No significant

effects were found on brand thoughts (Fs < 1) or on total thoughts (F < 1) generated. Consistent with the

attitude results reported above, however, participants expressed significantly more negative thoughts toward

the mild (m = .49) than the intense (m = .17) emotional appeal (F = 5.45, p < .05). There were no differences

in positive or neutral thoughts about the advertisement (Fs < 1).

While there were no significant differences in the total number of feelings experienced in response to

the two appeals (mmild = .70, mintense = .96, F = 2.21, p < .14), participants did experience significantly more

warm feelings in response to the intense emotional appeal (m = .70) compared to the mild appeal (m = .38, F

= 4.16, p < .05). No differences were found for upbeat or negative emotional responses to the

advertisements.

Discussion

Results of Experiment 1 indicate that emotional advertising appeals in general maybe most likely to

impact implicit memory to a greater degree than explicit memory. Overall implicit memory, measured at the

conceptual-level, for the target brand was better than explicit memory performance after exposure to the

emotional advertising appeal. However, the degree to which emotional appeals do impact explicit memory

can be enhanced through increased emotional intensity. Intensity of emotion, however, appears not to

impact implicit memory, contrary to expectations. This is somewhat surprising as intensity of arousal was

expected to heighten the degree of accessibility of the emotion in memory, thereby impacting implicit as well

as explicit memory.

The results also suggest that significant indirect memory benefits can accrue to a brand featured in an

emotional appeal. When participants were exposed to the intense emotional appeal for Agfa, they were

subsequently less likely to mention the two dominant brands in the film category in response to the

conceptual priming, category membership listing-task. Such a decrement in performance could be highly

beneficial for a smaller brand in a product category, even when memory performance for its own brand name

does not improve. In actual choice situations, if subjects are less likely to generate the names of the category

leaders, they may be more likely to turn to the lesser-known members of the category.

Overall, the results of this study strongly suggest that a relatively intense emotional appeal is generally

superior to a milder appeal. Exposure to the intense appeal resulted in fewer negative thoughts, more overall

feeling responses, higher attitudes toward the advertisement, better explicit memory performance and better

indirect implicit memory performance. Much advertising that is intended to be emotional might be perceived

as only mildly so by many consumers. Based on these results, an advertising manager contemplating the

creation of emotional advertising appeals would certainly want to ensure that the appeal was perceived by

target consumers as highly emotional in order to reap the bulk of the benefits that emotional appeals can

provide to a brand.

EXPERIMENT 2

Hypotheses and Overview

This theoretical premise of this research focused on the relative poor diagnosticity of emotional

experience arising from advertisements on consumer memory. While Experiment 1 offers in sights into the

relationship between emotional appeals and implicit versus explicit memory, it does not bear directly on the

questions of emotional diagnosticity. The key premise of the current research is that under certain

circumstances, the perceived diagnosticity of emotional experiences can be enhanced, leading to enhanced

explicit memory performance. Therefore, Experiment 2 examines the degree to which that diagnosicity can

be manipulated, and the impact of that manipulation upon measures of consumer implicit and explicit

memory. Considerations of diagnosticity implicate involvement as well. Thus the impact that differential

processing, resulting from varying degrees of involvement, has upon implicit and explicit memory is first

discussed.

The dual process literature has consistently demonstrated that involvement has a direct impact upon

the nature of encoding operations (e.g., Eagly and Chaiken 1993). While low levels of involvement at

encoding lead to shallow processing and a peripheral or heuristic route to persuasion, higher levels of

involvement promote deep, semantic level processing and a central or systematic route (Cacioppo and Petty

1982). Further, more elaborative processing increases explicit memory performance compared to shallower

levels (Craik and Lockhart 1972). As implicit memory phenomena have received more attention, levels of

processing effects have also been investigated and have shown that elaborative processing has effects upon

tests of conceptual implicit memory but no effect upon perceptual implicit memory (Jacoby and Dallas 1981,

Graf and Mandler 1984). In fact, it is this observed dissociation which led to the widespread recognition of

the two types of implicit memory (Roediger 1990).

Rather than focus upon involvement-based differences in processing, cognitive psychologists have

limited either the ability or the opportunity of participants to process information (Eich 1984). However,

involvement driven processing effects are expected to lead to the same effects. This is especially the case as

involvement instructions often encourage participants to focus on perceptual features of a stimulus in low

involvement conditions (i.e. looking for typos or spelling errors) versus encouraging more semantic level

processing in high involvement conditions (carefully reading and thinking about the message). The overlap

between these instructions and the nature of the material assessed in direct and conceptual indirect versus

perceptual indirect memory tests promotes the type of transfer-appropriate processing likely to result in

differential effects across the various types of memory being assessed (Roediger, Weldon and Challis 1989).

H4: High (versus low) involvement will enhance explicit memory and conceptual (versus perceptual) implicit memory.

The dual process models of persuasion have also conceived of affective elements in a persuasive

appeal as peripheral in nature, impactful only under conditions of low involvement and peripheral or heuristic

processing (Eagly and Chaiken 1993). Under central or systematic processing, affect is typically seen as a

non-diagnostic cue. While such a perspective adds additional support for considering the role of affect on

implicit memory, it is possible for affect to play a more central role, being processed more systematically and

thus impacting explicit memory performance in some situations. Intensity of affective experience,

investigated in Experiment 1 is one of those situations, as the heightened arousal believed to accompany

intense affect is believed to alter the amount of issue relevant thinking (Cacioppo and Petty 1982), though in

some conditions intense affect may inhibit processing more cognitive processing (Park and Young 1986). In

addition, however, the perceived relevance of the affect to a persuasive message will enhance the likelihood

that it is processed in an elaborative manner (Isen 1989). For example, relevant affective states should be

more diagnostic than irrelevant affective states under conditions of high involvement, and thus are more

likely to be accessed in an explicit search of memory contents (Feldman and Lynch 1988)

H5: High (versus low) diagnosticity of the emotional appeal will enhance consumer explicit versus conceptual and perceptual implicit memory, particularly under conditions of high involvement.

To test this hypotheses, the design used is a 2 (Involvement: High versus Low) by 2 (Emotional

Diagnosticity: High versus Low) by 3 (Memory Task: Perceptual Priming, Conceptual Priming versus Cued

Recall) full factorial between subjects design.

Method

Undergraduate students at UCLA (N = 223, 100 female) were recruited to participate in a series of

marketing research studies in return for payment of $10. They were first asked to complete several

demographic questions, and then to review the Grad Life mock-magazine used in the previous experiment,

with two changes. First, while all the advertisements featured in the magazine were still presented in full color,

the “editorial” pages in the magazine were printed in black and white.ix Second, the target ads featured in the

magazine were changed to manipulate the diagnosticity of the emotional advertising appeal to the product

category, as is described in more detail below. Respondents were given the same cover story used in

Experiment 1 regarding the nature of the mock-magazine. After reading through the magazine, participants

completed the questionnaire consistent with the cover story, asking a series of questions about the articles

they read and about potential topics for articles in the magazine.

Participants then spent approximately 20 minutes completing two unrelated filler tasks. Following

this was a one-page questionnaire featuring memory questions consistent with one of the three memory

conditions. These will be described in more detail below. This page did not carry a headline or other tag that

identified it as a continuation of the previous research associated with the Grad Life magazine, unless it was

referred to directly in the memory question, as in Experiment 1. In addition, a suspicion check was included

to assess whether participants connected the memory question to the previously viewed magazine. Next,

participants completed another short filler task (approximately 5 minutes) before receiving the final

questionnaire, which was identical to the one used in Experiment 1.

Independent Variables

Emotional Diagnosticity. The diagnosticity of the emotion to the advertised brand was

manipulated by varying the product category featured in the target ads. First, eight product categories were

pretested to determine their appropriateness for the target stimuli. These categories were chosen based upon

their relative positions on the FCB think/feel product grid (Ratchford 1987): Four categories rating as high

thinking products (motor oil, batteries, health insurance, and credit cards); four categories rated as high

feeling products (wine, greeting cards, perfume/cologne, gift box chocolates). All categories pretested were

moderately involving (means range from 4.5 to 5.0, where 1 = not at all involving, 7 = very involving) in the

FCB grid. Pretest participants (N = 54; 29 female) were asked to indicate the degree to which a decision to

purchase in the category was based upon two feeling or thinking items (see Ratchford 1987). In addition,

“warm” feeling brands were also specified so that the warm emotional manipulation would be highly relevant

to the product category. Therefore, the participants were also asked to indicate the degree to which a series

of ten emotions was descriptive of each product category (where 1 = not at all, 7 = very much), five were

warm items (Cronbach’s alphawarm = .94) and five were upbeat items (Cronbach’s alphaupbeat = .92). The results of

this pretest showed that batteries (mTF = 2.69) were the most “thinking” product category, while gift box

chocolate (m TF = 6.40) was the most “feeling” product category. In addition, gift box chocolate was also

perceived as significantly more warm (m = 6.15) than upbeat (m = 5.61; p < .05). As in Experiment 1, real,

but relatively unfamiliar (Whitman’s Chocolates and Rayovac Batteries) brands were used in the

advertisements.x Also as in Experiment 1, copy was created focusing on the unimportant to minimize the

rational content, thus making them primarily emotional appeals.xi

A final pretest was conducted to create the advertisements. Each ad featured the intensely warm

photograph used in Experiment 1, as well as a headline reading, “The Ultimate in Warmth and Serenity

Whitman’s Chocolates (Rayovac Batteries).” Below the photograph were the weak attributes, and the

respective company logo. Participants (N = 20, 10 female) were asked to indicate the degree to which each

ad, the order of which was counterbalanced, was diagnostic with respect to product category by completing a

3-item scale regarding the diagnosticity of the appeal for making a purchase decision in the category (Isen

1989; where 1 = not at all relevant/not at all fitting/ not at all appropriate, 7 = very relevant/very fitting/very

appropriate; Cronbach’s alpha = .96), as well as to indicate their attitudes toward the advertisement on a four-

item scale (1 = bad/not at all likeable/negative/unfavorable; 7 = good/likeable/positive/favorable; Cronbach’s

alpha = .95). The results indicated higher diagnosticity ratings for the Whitman’s chocolate ad (m = 4.07) than

for the Rayovac batteries ad (m = 2.02, F = 3.96, p < .05), as intendedxii.

Involvement. Consistent with much of the literature on the involvement construct, motivation to

engage in deep or shallow processing was manipulated by changing the personal relevance of the magazine

under evaluation. In the high involvement condition, subjects were given instructions indicating they are

likely to serve as the target audience for the magazine and encouraging them to form a thoughtful impression

of it:

“Attached you will find a mock-up version of a new magazine that some MBA students from the Anderson School are considering launching, starting with a Southern California edition and then expanding nationwide. Please review the magazine and form an evaluation of it. As a participant in this survey, your opinion is extremely important, and will be analyzed individually by the publishers of this magazine. Thus, your individual opinion will weigh heavily in the eventual decision to introduce this magazine in Southern California. Accordingly, please take your time to read the magazine, both the articles and the advertisements it contains, and form a careful impression of it. After you have formed a well-thought out impression of the magazine, you will be asked to answer some questions regarding your opinion of it.”

In contrast, subjects in the low involvement condition received instructions downplaying the relevance of the

magazine to them and encouraging them to form a quick impression of it.

“Attached you will find a mock-up version of a new magazine that some MBA students from the Wharton School are considering launching, starting with an East Coast edition and then expanding nationwide. Please review the magazine and form an evaluation of it. As a participant in this large-scale survey, your opinion will be averaged with those of other participants, and will be analyzed at the aggregate level. Thus, an individual opinion will not weigh too much in the eventual decision to introduce this magazine to the East Coast. Accordingly, it is not necessary for you to take much time reading the magazine or its advertisements. Forming a quick impression of magazine, both the articles and the advertisements it contains, will suffice. After forming a quick impression, you will be asked to answer some questions regarding your opinion of it.”

Memory Tasks. All subjects participating in the experiment were asked memory questions

regarding both the product category to which they were exposed, as well as the product category they did not

see in their version of the Grad Life magazine. This allowed the non-exposure group to serve as a control for

the exposure group, providing a baseline measure of memory performance over which priming due to

exposure can be assessed in the indirect task conditions. The memory tasks in this experiment were identical

to those used in Experiment 1, with the addition of a perceptual priming indirect task. As before, participants

in the direct task memory condition received a cued recall question (“In the magazine, Grad Life, which you

reviewed earlier, you saw an ad for a brand of BATTERIES (GIFT BOX CHOCOLATE). Please write

down the name of that brand of BATTERIES (GIFT BOX CHOCOLATE) in the space below.”)

Participants in the indirect memory task conditions received either a conceptual priming instruction (“As

quickly as possible, please list all the brands of BATTERIES (GIFT BOX CHOCOLATE) you can think of

in the space below.”), or a perceptual priming instruction. In the latter task, subjects were given 10 brand

stems, consisting of the first letter of the brand name followed by a blank (i.e., R ), and were

asked to complete the stems with the first brand name that came to mind. The list of stems included a stem

beginning with R to measure the perceptual priming associated with viewing the target advertisement for

Rayovac, as well as a stem beginning with W to measure the priming associated with the Whitman’s appeal.

Though Experiment 1 did not include a measure of perceptual priming, a significant literature suggests that in

addition to the dissociation found in implicit memory performance at the conceptual and perceptual levels

due to differences in involvement at processing, investigation of perceptual priming may also provide insight

into the impact of emotional stimuli on implicit memory.

Emotion has long been considered capable of enhancing the perceptual readiness of a perceiver. The

primary goal of the New Look paradigm in perception was to assess the role that emotional states might have

on the basic processes of attention and perception (Kitayama and Niedenthal 1994). The researchers

associated with this paradigm argued that the emotional meaning of a stimulus could be responded to before

the stimulus was consciously perceived. In particular, physical attributes of positive stimuli were expected to

result in perceptual enhancement as compared to those of negative stimuli. The accompanying emotional

reaction was in turn believed to determine the nature of the resulting conscious percept of the stimulus.

Affect has also been shown to influence the perception of a stimulus, by focusing and narrowing

attention to the relevant perceptual code (Kitayama 1990). Affect associated with a target is produced by the

preconscious activation of the target, and is therefore induced prior to conscious, attentive processing. It

then in turn influences the subsequent conscious processing. For example, affective voice tone has been

found to enhance word recognition, even before the verbal content is fully analyzed and comprehended

(Kitayama and Howard 1994). Thus, affect appears to influence what has been termed “implicit perception”

reflecting a data-driven process by which the affective elements of a stimulus impact subsequent processing.

Similarly, Niedenthal (1990) shows that emotional expressions can be perceived implicitly, to influence

subsequent judgments in an emotionally congruent fashion.

However, affect can also exert a top-down, or conceptually-driven force as well, in that words or

other stimuli congruent with the emotional state of an individual are more accurately perceived than are those

which are incongruent with the current emotional state (Niedenthal and Showers 1991). Bower (1981)

discusses the potential for emotionally-congruent words to “pop-out” at the perceiver. Thus, affective stimuli

appear to operate at both a perceptual and a semantic level, influencing both what is perceived as well as

priming associated ideas, thoughts and images (Kitayama and Howard 1994). Importantly, this work justifies

thinking about the role of emotions on both perceptual and conceptual aspects of implicit memory.

Dependent Variables

The identical set of dependent measures used in Experiment 1 were used in Experiment 2, although

slight differences in the reliability indices in the attitude measures existed: Aad (Cronbach’s alpha = .93) and Ab

(Cronbach’s alpha = .85). In terms of emotional and cognitive responses to the appeals, thoughts were again

categorized into positive, negative and neutral thoughts about both the advertisement and about the brand.

In addition to those categories used in the first experiment, however, thoughts on the diagnosticity (i.e., “You

want to buy chocolates that are romantic and express your emotion for the person.”) or non-diagnosticity (i.e,

“The couple and their love seemed really unrelated to the function of batteries.”) of the advertisement to the

product category were also coded (Isen 1989), as were irrelevant thoughts (thoughts that were theoretically

meaningless, i.e., “My brother buys a lot of batteries.”). Feeling responses were coded exactly as in the first

experiment, into categories of warm, upbeat, negative and other feelings. Inter-rater agreement was high

(93%), and disagreements were resolved by discussion.

Results

The hypotheses were tested using a 3 (Memory Task Type) by 2 (Emotional Relevance) by 2

(Involvement) between subjects analysis.

Manipulation Checks. A manipulation check on the emotions experienced in response to the

target advertisements indicates that both appeals evoked warm emotions as intended. Participants indicated

the degree to which they experienced each of the five upbeat emotions (Cronbach’s alpha = .87) and five warm

emotions (Cronbach’s alpha = .92) in response to the target advertisements on the 7-point scale summarized in

Experiment 1. After subtracting the average upbeat response from the average warm response, both appeals

evoked significantly more warm than upbeat emotions (ps < .05). Interestingly, however, a two-way ANOVA

(df = 3, 218) on the impact of relevance and involvement on emotional responses found that the diagnostic

emotional appeal (Whitman’s Chocolates) evoked significantly more warm emotional responses (m = 5.04)

than did the non-diagnostic emotional appeal (Rayovac Batteries, m = 4.30, F = 7.05, p < .01). No other

effects were significant (Fs < 1). None of these variables had a significant impact upon upbeat emotional

responses (Fs < 1). This suggests that the diagnosticity of the emotional appeal to the product category also

plays a role in the degree to which emotions are experienced in response to advertisements.

As in Experiment 2, subjects in all memory conditions were asked to indicate what they thought the

purpose of the memory question they completed might be. Three subjects in the conceptual priming memory

condition, and one in the perceptual priming condition correctly related the memory task to the

advertisements they had seen in the Grad Life magazine. These subjects were eliminated from the data set.

Participants completed conceptual and perceptual implicit memory tasks both for the brand to which

they were exposed as well as for the non-exposed brand. Thus, those subjects who viewed the Whitman’s

Chocolates advertisement acted as a control group for the subjects in the Rayovac advertisement condition.

Based upon the completion rates of the control groups for each brand, significant amounts of priming

occurred due to exposure for both brands in the exposure groups. In the non-exposure groups, 23% of

subjects listed Whitman’s Chocolates in response to the conceptual priming question, while 3% provided it in

response to the perceptual priming question, in contrast to 73% and 32% respectively in the exposure group

(Chi-squareconceptual priming = 18.09, p < .01, Chi-squareperceptual priming = 10.78, p < .01). Similarly, 5% of non-exposure

subjects listed Rayovac in response to the conceptual priming question, and 7% completed the perceptual

priming question stem with it, while 65% and 26% provided it in the exposure group (Chi-squareconceptual priming =

29.59, p < .01, Chi-squareperceptual priming = 4.56, p < .03). Both of these results indicate that there was significant

priming of each brand over the pertinent base rate control group due to exposure to the target appeals.

Subjects in the high involvement conditions produced significantly more thoughts in response to the

target advertisements (m = 1.58) than did subjects in the low involvement conditions (m = 1.30), suggesting

that the involvement manipulation worked as intended (F = 5.37, p < .03).

Memory Performance. As in Experiment 1, subjects were deemed to have been either successful

or unsuccessful in providing the target brand name. Analysis using a general linear model revealed a

significant effect of memory condition on memory performance (Chi-square = 22.22, p < .01). This effect was

driven by better memory performance in the explicit (m = .51) and conceptual-level indirect task (m = .67)

conditions compared to performance by subjects in the perceptual indirect task conditions (m = .28). Overall,

subjects in the perceptual task conditions had difficulty with completing the stems with the target. Emotional

diagnosticity was also found to exert a main effect on memory across all conditions (Chi-square = 5.62, p <

.02), with higher overall performance occurring with high diagnosticity (m = .57) compared with low

diagnosticity (m = .43). No significant interaction between memory task condition and emotional

diagnosticity was found (Chi-square = 1.83, p < .40).

Hypothesis 4 predicts that involvement at the time of processing will result in better explicit and

conceptual level (versus perceptual) implicit memory performance. There was a main effect of involvement

(Chi-square = 12.57, p < .01), such that high involvement (m = .61) led to better memory performance

compared to low involvement (m = .39). Further, this effect was qualified by a significant two-way

interaction (Chi-square = 7.55, p < .03) between involvement and memory condition; both explicit and

conceptual level implicit memory performance were better under high involvement (mdirect = .68 mconceptual indirect =

.81) than under low involvement (mdirect = .34 mconceptual indirect = .54). In contrast, perceptual-level implicit

memory performance was identical under both high and low involvement (m = .28 in both conditions),

supporting Hypothesis 4 and past findings in the cognitive psychology literature (Bjork and Richardson-

Klavehn 1988).

Emotional diagnosticity and involvement were also found to interact significantly upon memory

performance (Chi-square = 3.79, p < .05) such that the best memory performance occurred in the high

emotional diagnosticity and high involvement conditions (m = .73), while the low emotional diagnosticity and

low involvement condition accounted for the worst performance (m = .37). See Figure 2.

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Insert Figure 2 about here. ----------------------------------------

Finally, in support of Hypothesis 5 a marginal three-way interaction between emotional diagnosticity,

memory condition and involvement was found (Chi-square = 4.18, p < .12). Consistent with predictions,

explicit memory performance is much better with deeper processing at encoding and high (m = .94) versus

low (m = .43) emotional diagnosticity. When the emotional appeal was relevant to the product category, the

emotional cue in memory appears to cross the diagnosticity threshold as predicted, resulting in significantly

better memory performance (F = 11.60, p < .01). Similarly, conceptual implicit memory was also best when

both involvement and emotional diagnosticity are high (m = .95), and drops when diagnosticity was low (m

= .80), however this difference is not significant (F < 1 ) in a planned contrast. Thus, as predicted, while

involvement was critical for conceptual level implicit memory performance (mhigh involvement = .87, mlow involvement =

.54, planned contrast F = 9.53, p < .01), emotional diagnosticity had no significant effect on this type of

implicit memory. This is an important dissociation between explicit memory performance and implicit

memory.

Under conditions of low involvement, memory performance in each condition was flat (all Fs < 1)

across the diagnosticity manipulations, suggesting that such diagnosticity is only likely to impact memory

performance when effortful processing is engaged in at the time of encoding. This is not surprising as

diagnosticity is expected to only be relevant when meaning-based processing occurs. In sum, while the overall

three-way interaction is not significant, this analysis provides support for Hypothesis 5 as the pattern of

results is as predicted.

Attitudes. Attitude results were analyzed via a 2 (Emotional Diagnosticity: High versus Low) by 2

(Involvement: High versus Low) between subjects ANOVA (df = 3, 206). Results indicate that participants

have higher attitudes toward the advertisement featuring the diagnostic emotional appeal (F = 8.40, p < .01, m

= 3.78) compared to the non-diagnostic emotional appeal (m = 2.58). No other significant effects on

attitudes toward the advertisement were found. Similarly, there was a significant effect of diagnosticity (F =

7.26, p < .01) on attitudes toward the brand such that attitudes were higher after exposure to the diagnostic

(m = 3.37) versus non-diagnostic (m = 2.99) emotional appeal. See Table 2.

----------------------------------------

Insert Table 2 about here. ----------------------------------------

Cognitive and Emotional Responses. The results of an ANOVA on thoughts toward the

advertisement indicate that subjects produced more positive thoughts in response to the diagnostic emotional

advertisement (m = .22, F = 8.35, p < .01) than to the non-diagnostic advertisement (m = .07). In addition,

participants produced more thoughts regarding the non-diagnosticity of the emotional appeal to the product

category after exposure to the non-diagnostic emotional appeal (m = .49, F = 14.12, p < .01) than to the

diagnostic emotional appeal (m = .22). No other significant effects were found.

Analysis of the feelings generated in response to the two ads finds that participants experienced more

warm feelings after seeing the diagnostic (m = .47) than the non-diagnostic emotional appeal (m = .16, F =

14.15, p < .01). In addition, a main effect of involvement on warm feelings was found; high versus low

involved subjects experienced more warm feelings (m = .42 vs. .21; F = 6.48, p < .02). Further, subjects

experienced more overall feelings after exposure to the diagnostic appeal (m = .95) than to the non-diagnostic

appeal (m = .71, F = 6.38, p < .02), as well as a main effect of involvement, such that more total feelings were

experienced under high (m = .98) than under low (m = .69) involvement (F = 9.62, p < .01). No other

significant effects on feelings were found.

Discussion

Previous research has suggested that emotional advertising appeals do not perform well on the

typical explicit memory tasks often conducted in copy-testing. This research has argued that this poor

performance is primarily due to the fact that emotional advertising appeals often do not meet the

diagnosticity “hurdle” necessary for successful explicit memory performance. Experiment 2 was conducted

to determine whether a diagnostic emotional appeal could lead to successful explicit memory performance,

particularly under conditions of high involvement, when diagnostic aspects of an appeal are likely to be

processed in detail.

Results show that diagnosticity of the emotional advertising appeal clearly has a beneficial impact

upon explicit memory under conditions of high involvement. Participants had excellent explicit memory

performance for the diagnostic emotional appeal, but not for the non-diagnostic emotional appeal when

highly involved in processing the original message. Low involvement subjects, in contrast, were equally likely

to recall both the diagnostic and the non-diagnostic emotional appeal, and their overall performance levels

were lower than those of the high involvement subjects.

These results strongly suggest that the previously mixed results regarding the impact of emotional

advertising appeals on explicit memory may be due to the variations in the diagnosticity of the emotion to the

product categories being studied. This aspect of the advertisements previously studied has not received much

attention, however, results of this research argue that if explicit memory performance and a thoughtful

decision process are important for brand consideration or purchase, the diagnosticity of the emotional appeal

to the product category purchase is important. Further, as predicted, emotional diagnosticity does not appear

to have a significant influence upon consumer implicit memory, either at the conceptual or perceptual levels,

offering support for the position that implicit memory performance relies primarily upon accessibility of

knowledge contained in memory rather than the perceived diagnosticity of that information.

Diagnostic emotional advertising appeals are clearly important for evoking emotional responses and

for producing positive attitudes toward the appeal as well as explicit memory. While emotions are evoked in

response to a non-diagnostic emotional appeal, they do not appear to be as strong and are accompanied by

less positive attitudes as subjects produce fewer positive thoughts about the advertisement and more thoughts

about its irrelevance for the product category. Thus diagnosticity of the emotional appeal is important not

only for memory performance but for attitudes and cognitive and emotional responses toward an appeal, as

well.

GENERAL DISCUSSION

While emotional advertising appeals have not traditionally performed well on memory tests, the

present research has argued that they can in fact have a substantial impact upon consumer memory. Relying

upon an accessibility/diagnosticity perspective, this research has argued that while emotional appeals may not

always be likely to impact explicit memory, they may be likely to consistently impact consumer implicit

memory. Results from both experiments support this premise.

Results of Experiment 1 indicate that in general emotional advertising appeals may be likely to have

more impact upon implicit versus explicit memory. However, results of this experiment and that of

Experiment 2 also suggest circumstances under which emotional appeals may be likely to impact explicit

memory, specifically under conditions of heightened emotional intensity (Experiment 1) or emotional

diagnosticity (Experiment 2) of the appeal. The similarity of the results on both types of memory of these

two manipulations suggests that perhaps emotional intensity impacts perceptions of diagnositicy in much the

same manner as does appropriateness of the emotion to the product category featured in the appeal. It seems

adaptive that intense emotional stimuli would capture more processing resources and perhaps be perceived as

more relevant or diagnostic pieces of information than milder emotional stimuli, purely because of their

ability to inspire intense emotional responses. And it is logical that we would want to pay more heed to those

stimuli in our environment which provoke stronger reactions. However, in Experiment 2, diagnosticity as

manipulated by relevance to the product category only influenced explicit memory under conditions of high

involvement at the time of processing. No involvement manipulation was employed in Experiment 1, making

it difficult to draw final conclusions about the ability of intensity to heighten perceptions of diagnosticity.

Perhaps intensity heightens both involvement and diagnosticity or perhaps it is merely that the effects of

arousal can mimic the effects of diagnosticity under some circumstances. Both potentialities suggest

interesting areas for future research.

The present research offers several significant contributions to the consumer behavior and

psychology literature. This is the first research to explicitly relate emotions to implicit and explicit memory

performance using an integrated framework from which specific predictions can be derived. Moreover, this

framework offers explanations for previously mixed results regarding the impact of emotional advertising

appeals on consumer explicit memory. Finally, while a number of researchers have discussed the degree to

which emotions can be made more relevant or more central to processing (i.e., Isen 1989), this represents the

first attempt to specifically manipulate factors related to emotional diagnosticity in order to assess their

impact on a variety of dependent variables of interest to consumer researchers. In addition to heightened

explicit memory performance, the present results show that greater emotional diagnosticity also leads to more

positive attitudes and thoughts toward the advertisement and the brand, and more emotional responses to the

appeal. The bulk of these positive effects argue for the importance of considering emotional diagnosticity for

both marketing academics and practitioners.

Given such a conclusion, however, it is interesting to consider whether it is possible, with creative

and well-executed advertisements, to make emotions diagnostic even in situations where it might at first seem

unlikely. For example, recently a brand of outboard motors executed a series of warm, fuzzy advertisements

for its product. While a priori outboard motors appear to be a more thinking than feeling category, these

appeals featured vignettes of families sharing special times in the outdoors together as a result of their

purchase of the product, thereby making the emotions evoked by the appeal more relevant to the ultimate

purchase of the product. Perhaps there might be differences in the perceived diagnosticity of an emotional

appeal across target markets. While serious sportsmen may not purchase an outboard motor for emotional

reasons, perhaps families looking to enjoy the outdoors together are more likely to do so. This suggestion is

in accordance with research which finds that perceptions of the diagnosticity of information may vary

according to expertise with the domain of interest (cf. Alba and Hutchinson 1987).

This example also suggests that the perceived diagnosticity of emotions in advertisements may vary

depending upon the ultimate goal of a marketing campaign. Perhaps the non-diagnostic emotional appeal

described above might not be successfully linked in memory with the target outboard motor brand featured

in the appeal, and thus perhaps not contribute to greater sales for that brand per se. However, experienced

emotions might pique interest in the category overall, resulting in information search and potential purchase

from within the group of brands that make up the category. Further, the emotion featured in an

advertisement may make the category more relevant to traditional non-users. This suggests that a market

expansion goal might more successfully rely on the use of what would otherwise be considered “non-

diagnostic emotions” leading to explicit memory benefits than would a goal of increased market share for a

specific brand.

Finally, while this research provides a unique contribution in the marketing literature by highlighting

the role of emotional appeals on implicit memory under a variety of important conditions, there are a number

of limitations associated with the research which afford areas for future research. For example, this research

focuses on the assessment of memory via brand name recall and category membership generation. These are

important measures, often of interest to advertising practitioners, but they offer a relatively limited

perspective on the impact of advertising on consumer memory. In large part, this limitation is due to the

nature of the implicit memory measures that have been developed and studied to date. These implicit

memory measures are highly relevant for work conducted in cognitive psychology experiments that expose

subjects to word lists or other context free stimuli, but in the richer world of advertising testing, they are

rather impoverished. Moreover, they offer a unique disadvantage to the study of major brands in product

categories, as these brands are likely to be highly accessible prior to experimentation, leading to an inability to

produce significant priming effects above these base levels. These issues make it important to think of new

measures that are appropriate to assess implicit memory in the domain of consumer behavior.

In addition, if the impact of emotional advertising upon implicit memory is to be a continued area of

investigation, it may be necessary to tailor the development of new measures to the investigation of emotions

in particular. While the theory reviewed above suggests that the measures used in these studies are

appropriate, they certainly are not very emotional in nature. Perhaps more emotional measures (akin to the

execution-related explicit measures identified by Friestad and Thorson 1993) would show even greater effects

(Krishnan and Chakravarti 1993).

This research also only examines the impact of one type of emotional response, warmth, upon

implicit and explicit memory. However, other types of emotional responses may impact memory differently.

For example, more upbeat emotional responses, characterized by higher levels of individual arousal, may have

a greater impact upon explicit memory. Moreover, the greater distinction between felt and depicted upbeat

emotions (Stout, Homer and Liu 1990) may have implications for memory effects as well. Perhaps emotional

appeals which successfully depict upbeat emotions but do not actually inspire upbeat feelings in consumers

will primarily impact implicit memory, in contrast to the potential explicit memory effects of those which

successfully generate upbeat feeling responses.

Finally, as mentioned previously, the experiments in this research do not compare the impact of

emotional advertising appeals with non-emotional, or rational appeals. However, this comparison is critical

for truly comparing the impact of emotional advertising appeals on implicit and explicit memory

performance. While the emotional appeals tested in this set of experiments perform generally in the manner

expected with respect to implicit and explicit memory, additional insight is needed with respect to the impact

that a non-emotional appeal might have upon the same memory measures.

Figure 1

Experiment 1: Impact of Emotional Strength on Direct (Explicit) and Indirect (Implicit) Measures of Memory

0.68

0.34

0.79

0.6

0

0.1

0.2

0.3

0.4

0.5

0.6

0.7

0.8

0.9

Mild Intense

Emotional Strength

Mem

ory

Perf

orm

ance

Conceptual Priming(IMPLICIT)Cued Recall (EXPLICIT)

Table 1

Experiment 1: Impact of Emotional Strength of Attitudes, Cognitive and Emotional Responses

Emotional Strength

Mild

Intense

Dependent Variable

Attitudes Attitude toward the Ad 4.30 4.20 Attitude toward the Brand 3.75 4.50 Cognitive Responses Positive Brand .04 .08 Negative Brand .10 .11 Neutral Brand .08 .17 Positive Advertisement .06 .06 Negative Advertisement .49 .17 Neutral Advertisement .08 .17 Total 1.13 .96 Emotional Responses Warm .38 .70 Upbeat .30 .23 Negative .02 .02 Total .70 .96

Figure 2

Experiment 2: Impact of Emotional Diagnosticity and Involvement on Direct (Explicit) and Conceptual and Perceptual Indirect (Implicit) Measures of Memory

High Involvement

0.8

0.43

0.940.95

0.330.3

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

High Diagnosticity Low Diagnosticity

Emotional Diagnosticity

Mem

ory

Per

form

ance

Direct

ConceptualIndirectPerceptualIndirect

Low Involvement

0.35

0.53

0.24

0.33

0.54

0.26

0

0.2

0.4

0.6

0.8

1

High Diagnost ic i ty Low Diagnost ic i tyEmotional Diagnosticity

Mem

ory

Perf

orm

ance Direct

ConceptualImplicitPerceptual Implicit

Table 2

Experiment 3: Impact of Emotional Diagnosticity and Involvement on Attitudes, Cognitive and Emotional Responses

Involvement

High

Low

Emotional Diagnosticity

Emotional Diagnosticity

High

Low

High

Low

Dependent Variable Attitudes Attitude toward the Ad 3.74 3.82 2.56 2.59 Attitude toward the Brand 3.22 3.50 2.99 2.99 Cognitive Responses Positive Advertisement .29 .06 .15 .08 Negative Advertisement .55 .42 .44 .42 Neutral Advertisement .23 .23 .23 .15 Positive Brand .04 .06 .07 .06 Negative Brand .06 .04 .03 .04 Neutral Brand .08 .09 .03 .06 Diagnosticity .00 .02 .00 Non-diagnosticity .21 .47 .00 .52 Total 1.62 1.52 .23 1.23 Emotional Responses Warm .62 .33 .23 .10 Upbeat .49 .51 .38 .44 Negative .00 .02 .03 .00 Total

1.17 .75 .79 .63

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ENDNOTES

i In examining the impact of emotional advertising appeals, researchers have often drawn distinctions between the broader concept of affect and the more specific terms, “mood” and “emotions” or “feelings.” Mood states are typically thought of as relatively mild, more enduring affective states, not evoked in response to a single encounter with a particular stimulus (cf. Isen, 1989). In contrast, emotions or feelings (often used interchangeably, e.g., Burke and Edell 1989) are stimulus-specific responses which are typically short-lived (Gardner 1985). Drawing on prior research which focuses on emotional responses to persuasion appeals rather than mood effects (e.g., Batra and Ray 1986, Aaker, Stayman and Hagerty 1986), we focus only on emotions or feelings in this research. ii Note, however, that Bjork and Richardson-Klavehn (1988) distinguish between intentional explicit memory, which is characterized by a conscious, strategic attempt to remember, and involuntary explicit memory, defined as the spontaneous re-experiencing or reconstruction of an episode. It is the former type of explicit memory that is the focus of discussion throughout this research. iii While theoretically it is possible to cross the task and memory types, typically direct measures are used to assess explicit memory, while implicit memory is measured indirectly, and these terms appear to be emerging as the standard vocabulary for measuring these effects (cf. Merikle and Reingold 1991). iv As in research in cognitive psychology which exposes subjects to multiple repetitions of the target stimulus (Bjork and Richardson-Klavehn 1987; hence the term “repetition priming”), subjects saw the target advertisement twice in the mock-magazine. v To identify important and unimportant attributes of film, an independent set of participants rated a series of 12 film attributes on their importance (1 = not at all important; 7 = very important). The three most important attributes identified were: Color quality (m = 6.69); sharpness of image (m = 6.53); and price (m = 5.08). The three least important attributes were: Package design (m = 2.00); manufacturer participation in event sponsorship (m = 2.23); and country of origin (m = 2.00). vi A real rather than fictitious brand was chosen for methodological reasons, specifically for the conceptual priming measure, which will consist of the generation of category membership. While a fictitious brand would be a cleaner stimulus for other measures, it was deemed unlikely that a fake brand would appear on a list of category members, unless participants relied upon their explicit memory for the fictitious brand name. Thus, consistent with the approach taken in the cognitive psychology literature, Agfa was chosen as it is a lesser-known member of the photographic film category. To insure this, a pretest was conducted in which participants (N = 13) were asked to list all brands of film they could recall. Two participants (15%) included Agfa on that list (Kodak and Fuji were listed by all participants). Subsequently, participants rated their familiarity with Agfa (m = 2.53), Kodak (m = 6.31) and Fuji (m = 5.46), as well as their use of each brand (Agfa m = 1.61, Kodak m = 5.61, Fuji m = 3.92) on scales of 1 to 7 (where 1 = not at all familiar, 7 = very familiar; and 1= never use, 7 = always use). These results suggest that while Agfa is known by American consumers, it is much less well-known than Kodak and Fuji, and is thus suitable for the assessment of conceptual priming. vii Specifically, the SAS procedure CATMOD was used to analyze all the memory data in the paper. This is a procedure which allows for the analysis of categorical data that can be represented by a two dimensional contingency table. Here, the term ANOVA is used to denote the analysis of response functions and the partitioning of variation among those functions into various sources (SAS/STAT User’s Guide, Volume 1, Version 6). viii Most subjects indicated that the task was an attempt to see which brands came to mind most quickly. ix This change was made for logistical reasons as it was quite time-consuming and expensive to create more than 200 full-color copies of the target magazine. x To select the brand in each category, an independent set of pretest participants (N = 19; 9 female) were asked to list all the brands of batteries and gift box chocolates they could recall. To mirror the stimuli used in Experiment 1, real, but lesser-known brands were selected. While the Energizer and Duracell brands of batteries were listed by virtually all participants (100% and 95% respectively), Rayovac Batteries was mentioned by just 25% of subjects. Similarly, Whitman’s chocolates was mentioned again by 25%, compared with Godiva and See’s Candies, which were mentioned by nearly all participants (98% and 93% respectively). xi Pretest participants generated three highly important attributes for batteries: length of life (m = 6.0), price (m = 5.45) and an included battery tester ( m = 5.3) and three low important attributes: U.S. company (m = 2.35), colorful batteries (m = 2.8) and unique company logo (m = 2.3). The three most important attributes for gift box chocolates were taste (m = 6.8); smell (m = 6.0); and flavor variety (m = 5.30); the three least important attributes were colorful chocolates (m = 3.3); company sponsors special events (m = 2.75); and old-fashioned company logo (m = 2.65). xii Additional analysis indicated that emotional diagnosticity did not significantly affect Aad (F = 1.79, p < .19), though the means were directionally consistent with such an effect (mhigh diagnosticity = 2.45; mlow diagnosticity = 1.85). The diagnostic emotional appeal generated significantly more warm feelings (m = .47) and less negative feelings (m = .32) than did the non-diagnostic appeal (mwarm = .12; mnegative

= .76; ps < .05). There were no differences in the number of upbeat (F = 1.12, p < .30) or total (F < 1) feelings about the appeals.