CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Background of the Study Communication is one of the most important things for us to live in this world wherein people express different views, opinions and viewpoints about the current issues in our lives (Thompson, 1967). It is important because of the fact that there are billions of people living in this world and it is very impossible for us to communicate with others simultaneously. And for that reason, different modes of communication are invented and innovated. One of the most, if not the only, used form of communication today is through the use of our internet.
From your internet, you can access incredible amounts of information including texts, graphics, audio and video. You can search databases at the Library of Congress, view masterpieces by Michelangelo, take an aerial tour of the Philippines, or dissect a virtual frog. You can send email, receive electronic newsletters and “chat” with others online. This is a new medium in education requiring strategies and new learning is happening increasingly using an interconnection of networks that links together millions of computers worldwide.
The internet, according to Visual Basic 6: Proficiency in Application Development, is a huge system of voluntary linked networks with millions of documents, records, databases and variety of information. It can be referred to as the “information superhighway”. That is why it is one of the most accessible forms of information gathering and dissemination. But internet in our generation is not just simply for researching, emailing or chatting purposes. This is also a form of interactive socialization with our family, friends and even to the people we are not familiar to.
This is the wonderful world of social networking sites; and the most famous of them all, FACEBOOK. Facebook is a social network service and website launched in February 2004 that is operated and privately owned by Facebook, Inc. The users may create a personal profile, add other users as friends and exchange messages, including automatic notifications when they update their profile. Furthermore, users may join common interest user groups, organized by workplace, school, or college, or other characteristics. The name of the ervice stems from the colloquial name for the book given to students at the start of the academic year by university administrations in the US with the intention of helping students to get to know each other better. Facebook allows anyone who declares them to be at least 13 years old to become a registered user of the website (www. wikipedia. org). Here in our country alone, according to Lim of Sun Star Cebu, the Philippines ranks eighth among the countries in the world with the most number of Facebook users.
In fact, in September last year, there were only 4,832,040 Facebook users in the country, putting the Philippines in 13th place in the world in terms of number of users, said Vera Files trustee Luz Rimban during a seminar-workshop last week at Waterfront Cebu City Hotel and Casino. But the number of Filipinos on Facebook continues to rise and helps the Philippines keep its position as the fifth largest in the world’s leading social networking site. Facebook analytics company SocialBakers reports that, as of Feb. 2011, there are now 22,515,820 Filipinos on Facebook. This means 1. -million Filipinos signed up on Facebook in a month and represents an increase of seven percent from 20,802,540 in Jan. 2011, as reported by Philippine tech company Yehey! , also citing SocialBakers. (Cruz, 2011) As what was said in the definition of Facebook, it originated for the sole purpose for teenagers, college students in particular, to be familiar to their new environment and as well as their new classmates. During the first day of classes, college students have this “culture shock” because they see that everything is new: new school, new classrooms, new teachers and new classmates.
If one is not that independent, they might be nauseous and not enter their classrooms anymore. They feel that way because they seem to realize that they do not know anybody from the room and it’s like everyone’s watching your every move once you enter the class. This might be the initial reaction that we feel, but as soon as we start introducing ourselves to our seatmate and eventually our classmates, we tend to build friendship during the first day and probably the very last thing that we want to know is his/her number or Facebook account.
This is the first step to friendship. Next, we chat with them and ask about the given requirements of the professors, though we knew about it, just to have conversation. The nature of these social exchanges is characterized by either one-on-one or one-on-many communication scenario. Bryant and Oliver (2009), found out that people who are shy but wish to be social were able to develop a closer and more satisfactory relationship with others online, compared to those who are characterized by high shyness/low sociability, low shyness/high sociability.
Other scholars’ finding suggests that only when online relationships were built on shared interests or sincere disclosure of one’s true self, then a healthy and perhaps lasting relationship could potentially flourished. Other scholars’ finding suggests that only when online relationships were built on shared interests or sincere disclosure of one’s true self, then a healthy and perhaps lasting relationship could potentially flourished. Indeed, teenagers learn that friendships must be kept through effort and behavior that indicates a commitment towards preserving the relationship and satisfying the relational needs of both partners.
For example, Oswald and Clark (2003) found that when transitioning to college, high school best friends experience decreased satisfaction, commitment, rewards, and investments with increased costs and alternatives. However, students who maintained their best friends from high school during their first year in college reported engaging in more maintenance behaviors — positivity, supportiveness, self-disclosure, and interaction – than students in best friendships that did not survive the transition to college.
Although maintaining high school best friendships required increased effort, partners reported benefits such as reduced social loneliness. Accordingly, a need exists to explore how relationship maintenance strategies are utilized in various venues to enable the survival of various teenage relationships during the college years. The Internet’s ability to aid in the maintenance of relationships has been noted (McKenna & Bargh, 2000).
The Internet might be an especially useful tool for college students who report using email and instant messenger to communicate with friends and preserve feelings of intimacy and closeness (Cummings, Lee, & Kraut, 2006). ). Online social networking sites have also become increasingly popular venues for young adults to interact and build profiles that “((re)present their public persona (and their networks of connections) to others” (Acquisti & Gross, 2006, p. 2).
Facebook, allows members to create personal profiles that portray their identity through information such as their interests, favorite activities, religious affiliation, political orientation, jobs, relationship status, and even users can post pictures, videos and communicate with their friends by leaving message on each photo. Through the existence of social networking sites especially the Facebook, people, most especially the students, are able to establish and maintain friendship not just through personal contact, but also through the cable wires of new technology, the technology of FACEBOOKING.
CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE This chapter includes the purpose of the literature review, a review of the literature on the effects of subliminal advertising on moralities of the Filipinos, subliminal messages, perceptions and other literature sources. The chapter highlights human effects of the advertising research review. Purpose The purpose of the study has been demonstrated or to show the effectiveness of subliminal messaging and advertisement to prime individual responses and stimulate mild emotional activity. It often based them on the persuasiveness of the message.
We suggest that subliminal messages have an effect when the messages are goal-relevant. This chapter presents the review related research of how the said study affects to the children and high school students who spend most of their time watching television. The literature about the personal message, effects of the advertisement and relationship learned after watching the videos, to the primary and secondary students. Also concluded that “the cultural implications of subliminal indoctrination which is a major threat to human rights throughout the world”.
Meaning of Subliminal Advertising In previous conducted research of prominent figures in the mass society, it had been keyed in that Subliminal Advertising has massive effects on the society especially to those who had been greatly exposed to it. The advertising industry, a prominent and powerful industry, engages in deceptive subliminal advertising, which most us are unaware of. By bypassing our unconscious mind using subliminal techniques, advertisers tap into the vulnerabilities surrounding our unconscious mind, manipulating and controlling us in many ways.
Since the 1940’s, subliminal advertising blossomed until now, when you can find subliminal in every major advertisement and magazine cover. Legislation against the advertisers has had no effect in curbing the use of subliminal. In this Information Age, it seems people are no longer in control of the people. The ones in control are the ones with knowledge (as usual). In this case, the advertisers have it; you don’t. Subliminal Messages A subliminal message is a signal or message embedded in another medium, designed to pass below the normal limits of the human mind’s perception.
These messages are unrecognizable by the conscious mind, but in certain situations can affect the subconscious mind and importantly, the unconscious mind, and can negatively or positively influence subsequent later thoughts, behaviors, actions, attitudes, belief systems and value systems. The concept subliminal is archaic, although it is in daily use. The main problem is its necessary bound to the idea of a well-defined perceptual threshold, a concept now in disuse by the first appearance of the signal detection theory into cognitive sciences.
However, we’ll remain to use this term, (so as the word “trance” in the field of hypnosis), due to the fact that it is deep-rooted in the minds of both public and the scientists. The isolated term means “below a threshold,” however there is no clearly defined threshold to sensory perception. Indeed, there are many different perceptual features processed and detected before they are brought to our awareness, with the assistance of our attention. This makes the concept highly flexible in what and how we can integrate perceptual impressions into our awareness.
In scientific usage, we can call a stimulus subliminal only if it is faint enough, brief enough, or somehow cannot stimulate the senses enough to induce us to notice its presence, yet subsequent tests can register its presence. But, a more scientifically accurate word for this concept would be slightly perceptible. The mainstream meaning of the word “subliminal” is any effect that influences our perception from outside of our awareness. Subliminal Stimuli
It could be any sensory stimuli below an individual’s absolute threshold for conscious perception. Visual stimuli may be quickly flashed before an individual may process them, or flashed and then masked, thereby interrupting the processing. Audio stimuli may be played below audible volumes, similarly masked by other stimuli, or recorded backwards in a process called back-masking. Subliminal perception This occurs whenever stimuli presented below the threshold or limens for awareness are found to influence thoughts, feelings, or actions.
The term subliminal perception was originally used to describe situations in which weak stimuli were perceived without awareness. In recent years, the term has been applied more generally to describe any situation in which unnoticed stimuli are perceived. The concept of subliminal perception is of considerable interest because it suggests that peoples’ thoughts, feelings and actions are influenced by stimuli that are perceived without any awareness of perceiving. One way is simply to ask observers whether or not they are “aware” of a stimulus.
If the observer denies any awareness, then the stimulus is, by definition, below an awareness threshold. Using this approach, unconscious perception consists of demonstrating that observers can be affected by stimuli whose presence they do not report. Another way to define “awareness” involves require observers to distinguish between two or more stimuli that are presented successively. With fast exposure durations, observers may be unable to distinguish between stimuli, or between a stimulus’s presence and absence.
Effect of Subliminal Advertising on the moralities of Filipinos According to the research psychologists, subliminal messages do not produce a powerful, enduring effect on behavior but to the research laboratories, it reveals little effect beyond a subtle, fleeting effect on thinking. Subliminal is a term commonly used to actually mean several distinct types of hidden messages. • Artistically or Blatant concealed messages suggestive of instinctual drives • Images of contrived social exchanges and explicit body language • briefly or faint flashed images or words Metaphor or other “hypnotic” patterns • acoustically backward messages or masked in music songs Of all these various types of “subliminal” effects, psychologists refer only to the flashed words or pictures, and the acoustic masking of a message, when they discuss about subliminal or marginal perception. Putting it in other words, the scientific experimenters involved in research into subliminal priming agree that it do exists, however they are of the opinion that it consists of relatively fleeting and weak effects of mainly theoretical interest.
This is probably true of unconscious lexical priming. However, according to the research on the effects of subliminal perception, the most effective are words and pictures that are flashed in between video scenes and subliminal messages embedded in songs. These were found to be really powerful stimuli that have certain psychological effects, which mean this technology does have the ability to affect the psychological state of a person. Experts also found that the psychological effects of subliminal advertising are quite temporary, though very real.
This is why for subliminal suggestions to be successfully persuasive; they have to be applied repeatedly and regularly until the desired action is achieved. Another finding is that unlike other advertising techniques marketers use, subliminal happen to be the only ones that have the power to influence behavior, albeit indirectly. Whether all of these elements has an “unconscious” influence is rather a matter of empirical evidence, however whether there are effective influences is a matter or more investigation.
Lumping all these elements together into a main category with faint and brief messages used in psychology experiments indeed makes it impossible to select things like social influence, emotional appeal, suggestion, preconscious processing, and associative conditioning. Subliminal lexical priming It is the influence of flashed words on subsequent words in a multiple choice test. It lasts about 90 milliseconds and it does not influence the next trial or the next experiments.
All subliminal lexical priming is the result of a flashed picture on basic preferences in a choice test, and it is more robust. This is known as the “simple exposure effect”. Some variations of the simple exposure effect have been proven to achieve emotional areas of the brain, specially the amygdale, without conscious awareness. This is probably some kind of “classical conditioning” of feelings and memories without conscious awareness. It begins to enter into the area of something that can be produced into propaganda messages, especially if it is used as reinforcement.
Subliminal psychological activations are one of the main methods, or at least the most intriguing. All subliminal stimuli enter into our dreams and waking pictures in a disturbed way, it influences later recalls and perceptions, and remarkably it even can influence our social acting. But, it is indeed the most difficult to prove, presumably because its main feature is that it is the most vulnerable to individual differences and the mental states of the recipients, besides the vagaries’ of individual interpretations of results.
The most efficient methods in practice imply both unconscious and conscious elements; both coordinated to appeal to emotions and exploit natural information processing way and common biases, as well as carry our unconscious thinking processes in a determined way. Becoming somehow aware of subliminal effects generally reduces the influence of these, in both the exposure and psychological experiments. The whole combination of unconscious and conscious elements is carefully coordinated, however not duplicated (conscious elements are not transformed into unconscious).
The main reason why these methods are effective, compared to others relying or emphasizing on hidden pictorial messages, is due to the fact that hidden messages influence the feelings and thinking of test subjects, but they do not cause behavior, at least they don’t do it by any known effect. The subliminal influences behavior indirectly, principally by influencing perception, feeling and thinking. Conscious thinking triggers and organizes behavior, even though some aspects of behavior are not conscious, such as the main details of some movements or the expression of nonverbal communication.
Also hypnosis research has proven that compulsions and illusions can be created through simple suggestion under special conditions with particular people, without awareness of the source. These hypnotic suggestions are highly limited by the main expectations of the test subject, the relationship established with the hypnotist, or the characteristics of the situation. The higher are the expectation, the more the subject can be controlled, or the greater their sense of practice the more involuntary they conduct their response.
It is the degree to which messages can produce a similar type of dissociated control that is at the main point of the most potential threat of subliminal persuasion. Without the expectancy factors that make suggestion effective, it is quite difficult to see how the comparison can be made. Unless they are tailored to the individual, there is no evidence of any elaborate effect from preconscious processing of hidden messages, or that they are worth following as an aid to ads. Achieving this type of effect through a combination of subliminal messaging and hypnotic means is a theoretical possibility under some conditions.
At issue is the problem of creating the cooperative relationship needed for it, creating the expectancy that we can be controlled, and the differences in the way individuals respond to suggestion. The threat of subliminal influence seems quite limited at this time due to the weak reinforcement of messages, however the combination of effects can be hard to determine. A message employing subliminal methods, like any one, can often have effects on the listener depending on their psychological needs and mind. CHAPTER III METHODOLOGY
This chapter focuses on the method of research used, the methods in collecting our data, the sampling design performed, its statistical treatment and likewise the procedure. Method of Research For this kind of research, the best method to use is the descriptive method. It is because the study focuses on the effects of subliminal advertising to the morality of High School students. In a descriptive research, the question “what is? ” is to be answered. Now, we have to know the perception of High School students when it comes to subliminal advertising.
Once the respondents give their answers, the researchers will be able to analyze whether subliminal advertising has an effect on the morality of High School students. Methods of Collecting Data There are a lot of means of collecting data for the research and this time the researchers made use of two methods: questionnaire and interview. First, questionnaire is so far the most convenient and most reliable source of collecting data. High School students both from public and private schools are the target respondents for this research. Questionnaires will be istributed if the target respondent is in a hurry. The second method used in this research is the interview. Besides the questionnaire, interviews were conducted while the researchers show a video of a sample advertisement with subliminal message and then ask them some questions about the video and how it affected them. As much as possible, all students from all year levels in High School (both private and public) must be part of the research to be fair. Sampling Design For the sampling design, this research made use of purposive sampling.
It is because the focus of the study is High School students only. The respondents are randomly selected according to their year level and only 10 per year level are to be selected. The purposive sampling aims to focus on a particular group of people related to the study. In this case the High School students are gathered to be prospective respondents. Procedure To be able to accomplish this research, the researchers gathered High School students from the public and private schools. From each year level, the researchers will gather 10 students so there will be 40 respondents all.
Because we are to interview both public and private High School students, for the sake of impartiality, for each level, there will be 5 students from public and likewise 5 students from the private schools. On the questionnaire part, the researchers will show a video commercial with subliminal message and give them the questions. It will also be in a form of interview because after the questionnaire, if they still have time, they will be asked few questions about the topic. It will then be recorded by the interviewer.
If the needed respondents are already satisfied, then they will proceed to the organization of results, the analysis, interpretation and the conclusion and recommendation. References: http://www. selfgrowth. com/experts/eldon_taylor. html Eldon Taylor, Official Guide to Subliminal Messages & Subliminal Learning http://www. selfgrowth. com/subliminal. html http://sites. google. com/site/feorillodemeterio/thefilipinostructureofmorality Personal development articles From A. E. Kazdin (Ed. ), Encyclopedia of Psychology (Vol. 7, pp. 497-499).
New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Eagle, M. 1987. “The Psychoanalytic and the Cognitive Unconscious. ” In Theories of the Unconscious and Theories of the Self, edited by R. Stern. Hilledale, N. J. : Analytic Press. Greenwald, A. G. , E. R. Spangenberg, and J. Eskenazi. 1991. Double-blind tests of subliminal self-help audiotapes. Psychological Science, 2:119-122. —-. 1988. Subliminal auditory tapes: An evaluation. Psychology & Marketing, 46: 355-372. Merikle, P. , and H. E. Skanes. In press. “Subliminal Self-help Audiotapes: A Search for Placebo Effects. Journal of Applied Psychology. Moore, T. E. 1982. Subliminal advertising: What you see is what you get. Journal of Marketing, 46: 38-47. —. 1988. The case against subliminal manipulation. Psychology & Marketing, 46:297-316 Cruz, Tonyo. (2011, February 16). Philippines 5th biggest Facebook nation: Users up 1. 7m in a month. http://asiancorrespondent. com/48544/ph-is-5th-biggest-facebook-nation-users-up-by-1-5m-in-a-month/ Lim, Cherry Ann T. (2010, February 13). RP has 8. 38M Facebook users. Sun. Star Cebu http://www. sunstar. com. ph/network/rp-has-838m-facebook-users
