Altering Our Emotions

Commercials can be very emotionally manipulative. Through the use of certain music and visuals commercials can make viewers feel happy about their products so that they will go out and by them. What is interesting about commercials for prescription medicines is that the product itself is designed to alter the emotions of the user. In the below ad for a depression medication, a woman would like to wind herself up and make herself more robotic. I think this could relate to what Rosie's group was saying today about the Svedka vodka robot girl and its relations to how men would like women to be more robot and suppress their complicated emotions.



I think people are skeptical of whether or not medications are a good or bad thing and I think people are actively questioning whether or not what scientists tell them is always the best thing for them. I myself tend to automatically assume that anything a scientist or a doctor would tell me would be the truth and should be trusted. At the same time I am suspicious of medicines that offer to make all sorts of problems disappear. I think the problem for me is that either I cannot believe that these medicines can do what they really say or that maybe they can but their effects are really unnatural. I think as long as people are discussing whether or not these medications are really necessary for them, then the emotional manipulation in these advertisements will hopefully have less effect.