Activity 4 (A&B)

The main purpose of my first article was to conduct a content analysis of physical activity advertisement in an effort to determine which advertisements were more likely to include features that may attract and maintain attention levels. There were fifty-seven advertisements collected from top circulation Canadian magazines. They ranged from publicly funded health promotion pieces to corporate sponsored advertisements using physical activity to sell a product. These advertisements were all examined for textual and pictorial factors, which were thought to increase attention to the adverts.

The key question that the author is addressing in this journal is “Does the construction of advertisements contain features thought to increase attention and awareness?” The question is well stated, as it considered all the different features that could make a difference.

The most important information in this article is how advertisements work. The author looks into different possibilities how some adverts are stronger than others and how some work really well and the others don’t. The author mainly focuses on using physical activity for advertising purposes. “20% of the magazines (out of a total 176 possible) contained advertisements with reference to physical activity” the author then talks about that there is actually more commercial advertisements that use physical activity to sell products and foods, rather that advertisements using physical activity to promote health, sports and fitness. This may be due to the fact that “advertisements that promoted physical activity had greater than expected incidences of more than fifteen lines of text per advertisement but also were more likely to have left justified text. In my opinion if I was to flick through a magazine or even walk down the street and see an advertisement with more than fifteen lines of text to be read, it wouldn’t really appeal to me. I know that if the advertisement was in a magazine I would most likely flick past it, maybe stop to have a look but I certainly wouldn’t read all the text/information. If the advertisement was a poster in the town and had the fifteen lines of text I would walk past it to be honest. Nobody has time to stop and read an advertisement in the town, its always busy and we are always in a rush for some reason.

It has been agreed by various components that advertisements, which are more effective, are the ones that contain the presence of pictures and text, colour assessments, serif fonts and also the use of a metaphor.

The author doesn’t really show sensitivity to what she has wrote, she does however look in to different aspects and ways on how physical activity can be used to promote various things. She also takes into consideration not just the physical activity, but the text used, to much to little, the fonts, if one or more has been used, does it then make the advertisement hard to read because it is too busy, and also imagery and colours and how this can grab peoples attention a lot better than just text.


In my second article the main purpose here is the author is researching into facial and body expressions. He states, “The spontaneous tendency to synchronize our facial expressions with those of others is often termed emotional contagion.” The author then talks about how “it has been suggested either that emotional contagion is driven by motor imitation (i.e. mimicry), or that is one observable aspect of the emotional state arising when we see the corresponding emotion in others. Emotion contagion reactions to different classes of consciously seen and ‘unseen’ stimuli were compared by presenting pictures of facial or body expressions either to the intact or blind visual field of two patients with unilateral destruction of the visual cortex and ensuring phenomenal blindness.”

Is passive exposure to either seen or unseen expressions resulted in highly comparable psychophysiological responses that systematically reflect the affective valence and arousal components of stimulus? The author states, “Happy expressions selectively modulated EMG activity in the ZM, whereas fearful expressions increased responses in the CS.

What is interesting about this journal is, the author talks about how facial expressions and body language can unfold more rapidly when we are not aware, there is evidence proving that our emotions and expressions may be stronger when this happens. This really interests me as I thought to myself about being approached in a shop, maybe a phone shop, if I am not looking for anything in particular then I try my best to keep away from the salesman, purely because I know that they can be very persuasive. If they come up to me when I have been trying to stay away from them, then I feel that my body language would be a lot stronger once they started speaking to me about products.

I found this whole article very interesting as its something that I really don’t think about. I found this part of the journal particularly interesting “facial reactions were recorded using electromyography, and arousal responses were measured with pupil dilatation. Passive exposure to unseen expressions evoked faster facial reactions and higher arousal compared with seen stimuli, therefore indicating that emotional contagion occurs also when the triggering stimulus cannot be consciously perceived because of cortical blindness. Furthermore, stimuli that are very different in their visual characteristics, such as facial and body gestures, induced highly similar expressive responses”

I feel that the writer has not shown much sensitivity in this article and also felt that it was a bit repetitive but I found it really interesting. The author researched into various different things and also had a lot of evidence to back him up. There were also a lot of investigations carried out in this journal by different doctors and scientists, which were very interesting and useful to read.


I think the two articles work really well together. I found it very interesting that in my first article that, physical activity is used to sell products and food and it works better for this than selling sports, fitness and health. This could be down to the body language that is used in the physical activity. If you see and advertisement with, say, a picture of a guy playing football trying to sell a product but he doesn’t look happy, appealing, interesting or even approachable then this could definitely give out the wrong idea, I think that it would make people not want to buy the product, it would put the consumers off buying the product and the shop would end up loosing customers and sales. Where as, if the guy was smiling and looked like he was having fun, then this would attract customers to the product and maybe even influence them to buy the product.

I feel that the first article is not as strong as the second because it is all about how physical activity can help promote all sorts off different things. My main focus is body language and how facial expressions can cause fast emotions causing us to do different things such as buying products due to the salesman’s influence. Like I said above physical activity used to maintain attention levels does link in with the fact that facial and body expressions trigger fast emotions.
I feel the second article was a lot more beneficial to me than the first as it explains a lot about what the salesman has the power to do just by being confident and happy. Nothing has been mentioned in the article about whether body language is more appealing to just men or woman or both. This in some way could be a bit of a sexist comment but the question is, ‘are woman more likely to be persuaded by the salesmen than men?’ This is something that I would like to research into more, I think it could be quite interesting find out what attracts people to buy products and what is it that attracts them Is it the advertisements using some body language and facial expressions or is it the salesman and his/her body language toward the customer?


Activity 4(C)

After reading both my journals and taking each one into consideration and finding out the interesting facts that were mentioned, there are a few things that I would quite like to research into for some further understanding. This will be something that I will be doing as I took great interest to both articles.

· Using physical activity to help promote and to sell a product, It would of never crossed my mind, but like I said before, I wonder if it is the facial expressions and body language that this person is giving off that sells the product?
· I would also like to research into the man and woman theory, and whether its just woman who feel intimidated by salesmen, but maybe its not intimidation maybe its excitement that they are getting to buy something. I know for me personally I don’t like coming out the town with nothing, or maybe they are just easily persuaded and can say no? Or I could just be completely wrong all together, but I will have to find out.
· Unseen facial and body expressions trigger fast emotional reactions, I wonder if I would be able to find out more about this? What other reactions? Any emotions etc.

If I were to take this further I would again use the library’s cross-search tool, which enables you to do quite a wide search in different categories. This program is very useful and also quite quick.

Activity 4(D)

Berry, TR (2008) Getting to know the competition: a content analysis of publicly and corporate funded physical activity advertisements, Journal Of Health Communication 2008 Mar 13 (2), 169-80

Tamietto, M (2009) Unseen facial and body expressions trigger fast emotional reactions, Proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america 106 (42): 1766-17666