Organization: University of Debrecen
Categorization: Social sciences and Humanities
Research group leader: Dr. Katalin Balázs
Mission
The research group focuses on studying persuasive communication within the frame of psychology.
Introduction
The research group studies persuasive communication within the framework of applied social psychology. One of the main research areas is the effect of advertising communication on consumers. The focus of these advertising psychology studies is the systematic examination of different advertising strategies' effectiveness, such as humour, fear-appeal, and also creative, artistic or sexual elements. Furthermore, the effect on consumers of the appearance of traditional and different gender roles is investigated. We also study identifiable generational differences in the perception of advertisements in interaction with these advertising elements. In the work of the research group, the investigation of communication effectiveness for social good plays a prominent role. Within social advertising, we deal with, for example, environmental protection communication as a specific topic.
Consumer protection is another prominent area of our persuasive communication studies, where we investigate for example the persuasion knowledge construct.
The focus of the applied research is on individual differences as latent factors of consumer vulnerability, as the results support preventive interventions in practice theoretically. The deception of older consumers is a prominent topic, while another target group from the point of view of vulnerability is the group of children and young adults. An essential element of our psychological approach is that we pay particular attention to social interaction as a characteristic that can distinguish vulnerable groups, such as social interactions. Our research topics require an interdisciplinary approach, so the scientific literature and methodological background from the fields of psychology, economics and communication science are merged.