Temporal variation in children's reactions to tourism advertisement

This study adopts a neuroscientific approach to explore children's real-time emotional experiences in responses to tourism advertisements with different valences. Sixty children were exposed to three high-positive valence and three low-positive valence tourism advertisements while their brain waves were collected via an electroencephalogram (EEG). Dynamic emotional trajectories of frontal alpha asymmetry, a neural indicator representing a person's positive emotions, were extracted from EEG data using time-frequency analysis. Children's emotions on five key moments (i.e., peak, end, beginning, trough, and middle) were analyzed. Results show that the high-positive valence videos resulted in higher asymmetry scores in middle moments rather in other moments. Moreover, gender and age could partially moderate the impact of video valence on asymmetry scores in middle moments.