Emotional Appeals in Advertising: A Conceptual Framework

There is no general agreement among psychologists and behavioural scientists on the definition of the term 'emotion'. Emotions are defined as bodily changes, together with the mental change, influencing one's decision, sometimes out of the normal pattern for the individual, used particularly in reference to buying behaviour.'Emotions' is another word for feelings that are used as weapons of advertising firms to kill viewer's intention to buy any other product than a product for which an advertisement is made. People may have these feelings or emotions in response to things that are going on at the moment or when they remember something that happened in the past.
Probably, the most widely accepted definition of emotion is the one given by plutchik (1980). In the light of the psycho - evolutionary structured theory of emotions, Plutchik defined emotion as an inferred complex sequence of reactions to a stimulus. This sequence includes cognitive evaluation, subjective changes, autonomic and neural arousal, impulses to action and behaviour designed to have an effect upon the stimulus that initiated the complex sequence. Exposed to a particular class of stimulus, the individual makes a cognitive appraisal and forms a perception of the nature of the stimulus. This perception may provoke a subjective feeling that predisposes and prepares the individual for a particular type of behavioural response.