ArticleInternational journal of advertising2017
Eye-Tracking Evidence that Happy Faces Impair Verbal Message Comprehension: The Case of Health Warnings in Direct-to-Consumer Pharmaceutical Television Commercials.
Article in International journal of advertising, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 6 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
6 citing papers in PubMed.
- Advanced Consumer Behaviour Analysis: Integrating Eye Tracking, Machine Learning, and Facial Recognition.Journal of eye movement research · 2026Article
- The Impact of Health Warnings in e-Cigarette Content on Instagram on Adults' e-Cigarette Cognitions: Online Between-Subjects Experiment Study.Journal of medical Internet research · 2025Article
- Communicating therapeutic indication information in direct-to-consumer television ads for prescription cancer drugs: Exploring the effect of dual-modality presentations.Patient education and counseling · 2025Article
- Patients as Consumers: Reflections on the FDA's New Rule on Direct-to-Consumer Advertising.American journal of preventive medicine · 2025Article
- Visual attention to blu's parody warnings and the FDA's warning on e-cigarette advertisements.Addictive behaviors · 2022Article
- Assessing the Inclusion of Foil Items in a Scale to Measure Recognition of Health Messages.Communication methods and measures · 2021Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Risk warning or disclosure information in advertising is only effective in correcting consumers' judgments if enough cognitive capacity is available to process that information. Hence, comprehension of verbal warnings in TV commercials may suffer if accompanied by positive visual elements. This research addresses this concern about cross-modality interference in the context of direct-to-consumer (DTC) pharmaceutical commercials in the United States by experimentally testing whether positive facial expressions reduce consumers' understanding of the mandated health warning. A content analysis of a sample of DTC commercials reveals that positive facial expressions are more prevalent during the verbal warning act of the commercials than during the other acts. An eye-tracking experiment conducted with specially produced DTC commercials, which vary the valence of characters' facial expressions during the health warning, provides evidence that happy faces reduce objective comprehension of the warning.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.