"Feeling" Resistance: Exploring the Role of Emotionally Evocative Visuals in Inducing Inoculation
This study explores the role of emotionally evocative visuals in the inoculation process. 127 respondents supportive of medical experimentation with animals either received no inoculation message or were exposed to 1 of 4 versions of an inoculation video in which the identical audio was accompanied by visuals manipulated to evoke relatively high or low affect. All groups were subsequently exposed to an attack video message. Results indicated that the messages with visual affective consistency (i.e., either high or low affect associated with both the counterargument and refutation sections of the pretreatment) conferred greater resistance to a persuasive attack message than the messages with visual affective inconsistency. The implications of this research for both the role of emotion and the role of visuals in conferring resistance are discussed.