The Impact of Emotional Words on Listeners’ Emotional and Cognitive Responses in the Context of Advertisements

The study examined how individual words occurring in mediated messages affect listeners’ emotional and cognitive responses. Scripts from actual radio advertisements were altered by replacing original words with target words that varied in valence—either positive, negative, or neutral. The scripts were then reproduced by nonprofessional speakers. Real-time processing of the target words was examined through the use of psychophysiological measures of dynamic emotional and cognitive responses collected from subjects (n = 55) and time-locked to the stimuli. Recognition memory provided a measure of encoding efficiency. As predicted, listeners had greater frown muscle responses following the onset of negatively valenced words compared with positively valenced words. Results also showed that positively valenced words elicited orienting responses in listeners but negatively valenced words did not. Recognition data show that positively valenced words were encoded better than neutrally valenced words, followed by negatively valenced words, which was consistent with the finding for the impact of emotional words on orienting responses.