Persuasion and the structure of affect - Dual systems and discrete emotions as complementary models

Participants viewed eight PSAs, providing data on their cognitive and emotional rc spouses to each, as well as judgments of the perceived effectiveness of the messages. They also responded to Carver and White's (1994) BIS/BAS scales designed to measure individual differences in the behavioral inhibition and behavioral activation systems. Consistent with dual-systems theories of affect, the BIS scales predicted arousal Of negative emotions, while BAS was associated with the elicitation of positive emotions. However, when predicting perceived message effectiveness, the positive affects showed variation in the sign and magnitude of the coefficients, as did the negative affects. This latter finding supports a discrete-emotions perspective. Knowledge that the two affect structures are appropriate to different conceptual domains (i.e., elicitation vs. effect) should enable researchers to formulate more precise questions regarding the role of affect in persuasion.