Examining Methodological Approaches to Measuring Emotional Reactions to Advertisements: A Comparison of Self-Report and Physiological Response Measures

Abstract

Emotions are a key aspect of consumers’ responses to advertising messages. Choosing accurate measures is a crucial component of understanding these responses. Being aware of the limitations of those measures is also crucial. To explore how two common emotional measures relate to each other, this research compares the outcomes of self-report emotional measures (i.e., cognitive processing of unipolar measures of disgust) to physiological emotional measures (i.e., automatic facial expression measurement of disgust) in the context of two advertising formats: static ad images and video ads. In our first study, we demonstrate that physiological facial measures may be more sensitive than self-reports for determining variations in disgust between the ad types under certain conditions. Our second study offers evidence that providing an emotional context may improve the ability of self-report measures to detect differences in experienced emotions. Our third study explores how the cognitive nature of emotions affects measurement results by manipulating cognitive load. The results of this study indicate that facial expression analysis measurements of emotional responses are less influenced by cognitive load than self-report measures. This research provides inroads for further development in the area of facial expression analysis for physiological emotional response measures. In addition, this research provides insight into the cognitive processing that occurs in the use of self-report measures and the limitations of such processing.