Does It Matter If I Feel Sorry or Sorry for You? Testing the Roles of Empathy and Sympathy as Mechanisms Driving Viewer Response to a Dramatic Ad

Narrative messages on average produce higher levels of involvement, intention, and behavior than other message formats. Narratives also generate feelings of sympathy and empathy, although few studies have directly compared the roles of each emotion in the persuasion process. This article presents the results of two studies that tested the effect of exposure to a narrative or nonnarrative ad on persuasive outcomes and the roles sympathy and empathy play in the persuasion process. Both studies found that the narrative ad produced higher levels of involvement, intention, and behavior and that empathy played a more important role in persuasion than sympathy.     

The Effects of Edits on Arousal,Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?

This study examines the effect of the rate of edits (camera changes in the same visual scene) on viewers' arousal and memory. The rate of edits varied from slow to very fast. Results show that as the rate of edits increases physiological arousal, self-reported arousal, and memory increase. It is suggested that edits can increase attention to and encoding of television message content without significantly increasing the cognitive load of the message.     

Can the Brain be Trained? Comparing the Literature on the Use of EEG Biofeedback/Neurofeedback as an Alternative or Complementary Therapy for Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD)

ABSTRACT

Psychologists, social workers, and school counselors are increasingly adding neurofeedback (NFT), a controversial alternative or complementary therapy to their treatment plans for patients with Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. NFT involves training the patient in self-regulation of brain wave patterns, employing a standard diagnostic tool, the EEG, in an interactive operant conditioning mode not often used by neurologists or psychiatrists. Some NFT therapists claim in their books that they have sufficient expertise to advise parents against the use of Ritalin? and amphetamines, which are part of the conventional multimodal therapy strongly endorsed in a wide variety of clinical publications. In return, some of the leading conventional physicians and Ph.D. researchers in the field of ADHD have traditionally ignored or disparaged the literature of NFT as being insufficiently scientific and appearing largely in obscure journals or books published outside the mainstream medical presses. While most librarians are unlikely to have sufficient scientific or clinical credentials to pass judgment, one way or another, on NFT as a treatment for ADHD, an examination of the credentials of authors, their books, book reviews, journals, and the publishers in which opponents and proponents make their case is entirely within our purview, and such an analysis is provided.