According to socioemotional selectivity theory (SST), aging influences information processing style depending on the time horizon perspective (THP). In detail, older adults who perceived time as limited prefer emotional to factual messages, whereas younger adults who believed time to be expansive show the opposite pattern. When individuals pursue a specific goal, they tend to process goal-relevant information in more detail, which in turn evaluates factual messages positively. We investigated the moderating effect of goal pursuit on the relationship between biological aging and persuasion in October 2016 (Experiment 1). Results showed that both older and younger adults were more favorable toward factual (vs. emotional) messages when they pursue a goal. Experiment 2, conducted in March 2017, examined whether embodied aging affects persuasion. The results indicated that younger adults with embodied aging did not show a similar persuasion pattern with actual older adults, while embodiment studies demonstrated that younger adults with embodied aging act like older adults. That means that only THP changes the angle leading to processing. In the final experiment, conducted in November 2018, younger adults primed with limited THP preferred emotional to factual messages, which was similar to actual older adults’ responses. Moreover, we showed that emotional attachment mediated the effect of message types on the persuasion of younger adults with limited THP.

Three experiments explored how sweetness metaphors affect individuals’ attitudes. The results indicated that sweetness metaphors led to positive responses to the target advertisement and the advertised product, both when the sweetness was actually experienced (Experiment 1) and when the sweetness experience was imagined (Experiment 2 and 3). In Experiment 1, participants who directly experienced a sweet taste evaluated a mineral water advertisement more positively than those who did not experience a sweet taste. Experiment 2 showed that an imagined sweet taste generated favorable attitudes toward the same targets as in Experiment 1. Results of Experiment 3, which used advertisements of various product categories, were similar to those of the previous two experiments, where both direct experience and mental imagination of sweetness were advantageous for forming favorable attitudes.