An Empirical Study of Emotional Response to Sounds in Advertising

The goal of this paper is to better understand how individuals emotionally respond to common advertisement sounds. We attempt to model the antecedents to the emotional response variable by developing a set of hypotheses predicting emotional reaction and empirically test the hypotheses using data from 153 laboratory participants. During the survey, participants were asked to listen to 20 different sounds on a computer and subsequently answer questions regarding their emotional response toward each one. Results indicate the emotional response to a sound clip is predicted by the level of interest generated and how well the sound captured the participant’s attention