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Abstract
The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by Petty and Cacioppo, proposed two routes to attitude change: central and peripheral. The central route emphasises a high relevance of the message to the individual. In the peripheral route, the individual concentrates on heuristic cues like attractive expert sources and number rather than the content of arguments employed by the message to process the message. If these cues produce an attitude change, this change is likely to be shorter lasting and unpredictable of that individual's behaviour. Hence, the cognitive (central) aspect of the ELM overshadows its affective (peripheral) aspect, and the underlying suggestion of this model is that an attitude change is mostly reached through cognition as opposed to emotion. This study attempts to show that the emotional aspect is as important as the cognitive aspect. The basis for this conclusion is that even as an individual processes a message cognitively, that cognition has an emotional core. In addition, there is a possibility that content processing (elaboration) gives rise to emotions and that this leads to a longer-lasting change in attitudes.
Keywords: Elaboration Likelihood Model, cognition, emotion, structural equation modelling, consumer behaviour, Self-Assessment Manikin, PAD (pleasure-arousal-dominance)
INTRODUCTION
The roots of persuasion are embedded deeply in the human psyche as well as in human history. It was approximately 2,400 years ago that Aristotle clearly identified the three main aspects of the persuasion situation: source, audience and message content.
Given this support for the long history of persuasive processes, it is surprising that it was only 60 years ago that any sort of systematic research attention was applied to the study of persuasion. Carl Hovland, a. Yale psychologist, has been attributed with the creating 'the modern experimental study of persuasion'.1 Systematic persuasion research, however, can be linked to media effects research that began with Walter Lippmann2 and Harold Lasswell.3
The problem with this research was that it was based on anecdotal evidence and not empirical research.4 Then, in the 1940s and 1950s, there was a shift in researchers' thinking, as evidence increasingly pointed to an indirect effects model of persuasion. Hyman and Sheatsely5 suggested that a mere increase in message flow could not achieve persuasion and that effective message dissemination requires consideration of specific psychological barriers. This...