Do mind and body agree? Unconscious versus conscious emotions in product attitude formation.

Emotions play a decisive role in product adoption processes. Existing research principally measures the two emotional dimensions, pleasure and arousal, through self-reported questionnaires. However, self-reported measures rely on cognitive techniques to appraise emotions, thus reflecting conscious emotions but not unconscious feelings. This work employs physiological techniques (electrodermal activity analysis) to measure unconscious arousal and self-reported measures to assess conscious arousal. 160 subjects participated in a lab experiment with a 2 x 2 design: two contexts, direct and virtual product trial and two product typologies, hedonic and functional. The magnitude of conscious and unconscious arousal, their relationship and influence on product attitude were investigated. Results showed that conscious and unconscious arousal are two independent components of the emotional response, reflecting different factors. Further, they have a significant and diametrical opposite influence on attitude. The study provides an initial step toward using physiological measures to evaluate consumer emotional response to new products.