Activity, certainty, optimism, and realism: The verbal style in televised presidential campaign commercials.

Abstract

Presidential campaign commercials have been analyzed to determine their effectiveness with respect to length and style. However, to this point, no study has attempted to count and categorize the words used in the commercials. The current study analyzed 1178 televised presidential campaign commercials in terms of their activity, certainty, optimism, and realism.

These variables identify a verbal style and differences between winners and losers, and between incumbents and nonincumbents, with respect to the words used in their campaign commercials. Most striking in the findings was the overall low use of certainty words in the advertisements. This indicates that DICTION may not provide the correct variables for analyzing and interpreting campaign commercials. It is suggested that other variables be designed to measure the persuasiveness of presidential campaign commercials.

The commercials were transcribed from video tapes to computer disk. The transcriptions were then submitted to a computer content analysis to count and categorize the words with respect to the four major variables. The four variables were constructed using the formulas prescribed by Hart (1984).