ABSTRACT
This chapter helps people to: understand the benefits and limitations of experiments involving psychophysiology and eye tracking; interpret studies measuring skin conductance; comprehend the use of heart rate as a measure of attention and arousal; understand the use of facial electromyography (EMG) as a measure of emotional response. Measuring skin conductance is one of the oldest uses of psychophysiology to study persuasive communication. Physiological sensors placed on the palm of the hand to record skin conductance, an index of physiological arousal. Heart rate is an often used but difficult to interpret psychophysiological measure. Due to the complexity of heart rate analysis, its incorporation into research is not feasible for many industry researchers. Researchers in advertising and public relations need to be aware of limitations in interpretation when they run across heart rate data. Simply showing an increase in heart rate is insufficient to demonstrate that a message has led to an increase in physiological arousal.
