Elaboration likelihood model: A missing intrinsic emotional implication

Abstract

The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM), developed by Petty and Cacioppo, proposed two routes to attitude change: central and peripheral. The central route emphasises a high relevance of the message to the individual. In the peripheral route, the individual concentrates on heuristic cues like attractive expert sources and number rather than the content of arguments employed by the message to process the message. If these cues produce an attitude change, this change is likely to be shorter lasting and unpredictable of that individual’s behaviour. Hence, the cognitive (central) aspect of the ELM overshadows its affective (peripheral) aspect, and the underlying suggestion of this model is that an attitude change is mostly reached through cognition as opposed to emotion. This study attempts to show that the emotional aspect is as important as the cognitive aspect. The basis for this conclusion is that even as an individual processes a message cognitively, that cognition has an emotional core. In addition, there is a possibility that content processing (elaboration) gives rise to emotions and that this leads to a longer-lasting change in attitudes.