Analysis Of Emotional Appeal In Public Service Advertising Based On Relevance Theory

Public Service Advertising refers to that the advertising is designed for the purpose of social public interests and the improvement of their benefits. Based on the human emotion, the emotional appeal in Public Service Advertising(PSA) is an art form which focuses on emotional communication and aesthetic taste. it can maximize the acceptance of public for advertising message and enable the public to understand the advertising under a series of emotional experience, which can benefit the society. Using the emotion to move, attract and infect the audience. With the point of penetration and shocks of the emotional resonance, the emotional appeal of the PSA requires the language and form to avoid blunt preaching, and its originality should be based on understanding the public’s psychology deeply.Using the Relevance Theory to study the PSA opens a new perspective of research on PSA with the explanation for many complex phenomena in PSA. From the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, the Relevance Theory explains human communicative behavior and focuses on cognitive psychological process of both sides. The emotional appeal of PSA is also from the human psychological cognition to find the emotional entry point, through the manifestation of the people and things familiar in the awareness of public, and its shocks and emotional power is generated by the correlation between elements in the audience’s cognitive psychology, at last the idea that the advertising shows become a fact which is natural for people to agree with. Therefore, the Relevance Theory provides a good theoretical framework for the study of the emotional appeal of PSA, the Relevance Theory pursues the "optimal relevance", which is also necessary to achieve the advertising effect for the PSA.Based on the Relevance Theory and the previous studies, the thesis analyzes the emotional appeal of PSA in different forms and styles. Firstly, from the point of view of the ostensive-inferential communication, the thesis analyzes two kinds of the emotional appeal in PSA:the PSA with short form and meaningful form, which explores its influence on advertising effectiveness. Secondly, starting from the concept of context in relevance theory, the author explores the influence of cultural context and situational context in the emotional appeal of PSA for the psychological state of the audience in understanding advertisement. Finally, on the basis of optimal relevance, the thesis analyses the effort the audience pay in the understanding of the emotional appeal. In addition, the thesis also puts forward some proposals for the production of PSA with the hope that providing some guidance and help to PSA creation.The thesis finds the following points through study. Firstly, through novel ostensive behavior, the PSA designers are able to attract the audience’s attention and arouse their curiosity. Secondly, the PSA can combine the audience’s cognitive context with the advertising language and provide a series of cognitive assumptions from the emotional angle so as to produce an emotional resonance for the audience. Thirdly, in order to satisfy emotional experience of the audience, the Public Service Advertisement might use some corresponding artistic expressive forms correctly to provide the evidences directly or indirectly for the audience’s reasoning. These evidences can provide audience enough contextual effect, by which the optimal relevance could be achieved. Fourthly, the proper use of the ostensive-inferential communication, the cognitive context and the optimal relevance can promote the realization of the emotional appeal of the Public Service Advertisement. These concepts also have corresponding explanatory power for PSA’s emotional appeal.