Beating the News Blues: Mood Repair Through Exposure to Advertising

This paper explores mood regulation in advertising. In Experiment 1, participants made sad by previous media content experienced greater mood enhancement from exposure to a pleasant product advertisement than those made happy. Sad participants were also more likely to attribute their mood change to how they liked the ad and the product. In Experiment 2, exposure to a positively framed antismoking ad reduced negative mood more than exposure to a negatively framed ad. This was true, however, only for sad participants and not for happy and neutral participants, who were presumably less motivated to repair mood. In addition, exposure to the positively framed ad encouraged sad participants, but not happy or neutral participants, to attribute higher risks to smoking and express stronger antismoking attitudes than did exposure to the negatively framed ad.