Practitioner's and academicians' views are integrated in this overview of current thought regarding consumers' cognitive and affective responses to advertising.

Linked from the days of their origins, psychology and advertising developed as independent disciplines at almost the same time in the late nineteenth century. Providing an important arena in which psychologists have tested methods and theories, advertising has been a stimulus for research and development in such diverse specialties as learning and behavioral decision theory, psychometrics, perception, and social and mathematical psychology. Psychology, in turn, has contributed a wide assortment of tools, theories, and techniques to the practice of advertising. These contributions have found their place in virtually all areas of advertising practice -- stimulating creativity, evaluating the creative product, and informing the scheduling of media. Purposely eclectic, this volume presents new issues in consumer psychology and advertising such as the relationship between gender differences, cortical organization and advertising; new approaches to old issues such as attention as an epiphenomenon, and meta-analysis of comparative advertising research; and new applications of consumer psychology to other fields such as examining health behavior as consumer behavior, affect and political advertising, and the relationship between advertising and eating disorders. This volume is the result of the Sixth Annual Advertising and Consumer Behavior Conference, which was designed to bring together researchers and practitioners from both psychology and advertising. Chapter contributions are made by professionals in advertising and marketing, professors in psychology and marketing departments, and psychologists who consult for advertising and marketing organizations. Thus, the chapters represent a microcosm of the type of interaction that has characterized the interface of psychology and advertising for more than a hundred years.

In the 1980s our understanding of how advertising affects consumer behavior was undergoing a dramatic transformation. Recent theoretical and methodological advances in cognitive psychology, social cognition, and artificial intelligence were largely responsible for this transformation. These advances provided a better understanding of the information acquisition process and how information is stored in memory. Consequently, we have been able to incorporate memory, the processing of visual information and affect into our models of advertising effects. However, there were still many unanswered questions. Among these are: (1) Exactly what is the relationship between the different mediators of persuasion? (2) How is memory for advertising related to persuasion? (3) What are the theoretical underpinnings of attitude toward the advertisement? (4) What determines the effect of persuasion over time? (5) What factors affect attention to advertising? (6) What psychological processes occur during the watching of a television commercial? and (7) What factors affect individual differences in the processing of advertising messages? Originally published in 1985, the chapters in this volume provide insights into these questions. They are organized in terms of four psychological processes which contribute to our understanding of how advertising works. These are affective reactions to advertisements, persuasion, psychological processes during television viewing, and involvement.