How do people react to mixed emotions in an ad/medium context setting? The moderating role of discomfort with ambiguity

The moderating role of the personality trait Discomfort With Ambiguity (DWA) on the processing of mixed emotions in advertising is studied. In our experiment, the emotions between the medium context and the embedded advertisement were mixed. Results indicate that discomfort with ambiguity, which can be seen as a proxy for how well people are able to deal with mixed emotions, has a moderating effect on advertising processing. Individuals having a high discomfort with ambiguity respond less positively to mixed emotions in advertisements and contexts. Further analysis shows that high DWA people respond better when a joyful ad is embedded in a joyful medium context compared to a sad context. For low DWA people, as expected, no significant differences were found.