The Effects of Nonverbal Content in Political Spot Advertisements: The Interaction of Candidate Visual Presentation and Verbal Appeal Type

148 p.Thesis (Ph.D.)--University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2001.The results indicate that individuals are more confident in their beliefs about candidates when they have ample opportunity to see and hear the candidate. The findings also demonstrate that appeals based on a candidate's record of accomplishments are more effective than appeals based on a candidate's agenda. In addition, a pattern of dependable interactions was observed which suggests that when candidates do appeal to voters based on their agenda, viewer responses are more favorable when the candidate nonverbal presence is high. Finally, the findings support the view that, contrary to conventional wisdom, variations in verbal content have more influence on viewers' responses to candidates than do variations in nonverbal content. The results argue for further study to account for these findings and to explore effects due to the specific manner in which the candidates are presented nonverbally.U of I OnlyRestricted to the U of I community idenfinitely during batch ingest of legacy ETD