Neural Signatures of Emotion: EEG-based Insights into Love and Excitement in Advertising.

Background: Emotions are crucial in advertising by shaping consumer attention, memory, and decision-making. Love and excitement are popular emotional themes used in marketing communications, and while they are leveraged by marketers, other underlying neural responses to these stimuli have not been well studied. It is important to map how various emotional appeals are processed in the brain for valuable contributions to consumer neuroscience and neuromarketing. Purpose: This research seeks to investigate and compare the neural responses elicited by love-based and excitement-based advertisements through electroencephalography (EEG) and thus assess their unique cognitive and emotional engagement patterns. Methods: During this pilot study, EEG was recorded from adult viewers when they watched a series of advertisements sorted according to two emotional themes: love and excitement. Parameters in the EEG measured were amplitude fluctuation, levels of arousal, cognitive load, and frontal lobe activation patterns. Real-time neural activity was examined to establish the engagement provoked by each of the emotional themes. Results: Emotion-based ads produced fast, sharp EEG waveforms, indicative of increased arousal, cognitive load, and strong reward expectation. Such responses were largely lateralised to the left frontal cortex and implicated in goal-directed motivation. Love-based ads, by contrast, produced smooth, stable neural activity implicated in empathy, affective resonance, and introspection. Interestingly, this condition also engaged the medial prefrontal cortex, a region involved in emotional attachment and trust. Conclusion: The results indicate that excitement-peddling advertisements elicit instant attention and strong cognitive activation, while love-themed content invokes more profound emotional involvement and enduring affective influence. EEG is a valuable method for cracking open unconscious consumer responses, which provides strategic implications for marketing content optimisation. Based on the small sample size, this initial study offers a basis for further research in emotionally intelligent advertising and neuromarketing interventions.