Skip to main content

Negative subliminal messages work

Extracted from BBC News.

People can perceive subliminal messages, particularly if the message is negative, according to a UK study.

In three experiments at University College London, participants were briefly shown masked words and asked to classify them as emotional or neutral. The study, published in the journal Emotion, says being able to react to tiny cues helps us to avoid danger and may have useful marketing uses. But critics say there is no evidence this would work outside a laboratory. Professor Nilli Lavie from University College London showed 50 participants a series of words on a computer screen. Each word appeared on-screen for only a fraction of a second – much too fast for the participants to consciously read the word. The words were either positive (eg cheerful, flower, peace), negative (eg agony, despair, murder) or neutral (eg box, ear, kettle). After each word, the participants had to choose whether the word was neutral or emotional (positive or negative) and how confident they were of their decision. The researchers found that the participants answered most accurately when responding to negative words, even when they believed they were merely guessing the answer. They were able to accurately categorise 66% of the negative words compared to 50% of the positive ones.

‘Evolutionary advantages’

Professor Lavie said: “We have shown that people can perceive the emotional value of subliminal messages and have demonstrated conclusively that people are much more attuned to negative words. “Clearly, there are evolutionary advantages to responding rapidly to emotional information. “We can’t wait for our consciousness to kick in if we see someone running towards us with a knife or if we drive under rainy or foggy weather conditions and see a sign warning ‘danger’. Subliminal advertising is not permitted on television in the UK. But Professor Lavie said her work could be applicable to marketing campaigns: “Negative words may have more of a rapid impact – “Kill Your Speed” should work better than “Slow Down”. “More controversially, a competitor’s negative qualities may work on a subconscious level much more effectively than shouting about your own selling points.” The study was funded by the Wellcome Trust. But marketing psychologist, Paul Buckley, of the Cardiff School of Management, said there was no evidence that subliminal messages work in the real world: “From a practical point of view this probably doesn’t reflect what would happen in real life. “Certainly lots of countries around the world have legislation to ban subliminal messages being used on television and nobody has yet been able to point to any instance where a subliminal message has worked.”

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Box Hill High School Zone

Parents are struggling with moving into a good reputable school for their kid(s). Here is the zone for Box Hill High School.   Good luck with house hunting!

The Bose Soundbar 700 Won't Connect to App

Bose has one of the best speaker sound. I learnt about Bose more than 25 years ago and still a fan.  I bought Soundbar 700 in 2018.  It took me a while to set it up but it has been giving me troubles once a while.  Recently, I was not able to connect Soundbar 700 with my phone.  Done the factory reset on the soundbar, it didn't work. I spent hours reseting everything multiple times and finally I found this article,  https://www.bose.com.au/en_au/support/articles/HC1380/productCodes/bose_soundbar_700/article.html .  Tweaking them all and finally got it to work again. I think the most important setting is to TURN WPS OFF on the router!  Hope it helps.

Brivis Heater - Error Code #69

My Brivis HX23 Heater broke down this week.  H01 Code #69.  This code was not even listed in the User Manual!  Searching around the web and here is what I found: Secret Reset: This is not in the User Manual.  On the networker controller press FUNCTION > 1 > 4 keys and the screen will go blank and come back on after 30 seconds, this has rebooted the main PCB and reset the fault code. Use this with caution as too much gas build up could cause an explosion. Use it only after the unit has enough time to air out the gas build up. What is Code #69 or any other unpublished codes?  The best way to find out is to open up the heater unit.   There is a little LCD on the PCB showing what error exactly is. (Note: Opening up the unit may void your warranty.)