Abstract: Humor advertisement is a common type of advertisements, which is playing an important role in improving consumer product attitudes and promoting the development of the advertising industry. Based on the SOR theory and the elaboration likelihood model, this paper explores the impact, mechanism, and boundary conditions of humor advertisement on consumer subjective and objective ambivalent attitudes with three experiments. The results indicate that, firstly, compared to non-humor advertisement, humor advertisement could significantly exert negative impact on consumers' subjective and objective ambivalent attitudes. Secondly, there are differences in the mechanism of the impact of humor advertisement on consumers' subjective and objective ambivalent attitudes, which could alleviate the subjective ambivalent attitudes from the positive emotion through the peripheral paths, while produce a negative impact on the objective ambivalent attitudes both from the perceived AD credibility through the cognitive path and from the positive emotion through the peripheral path. Thirdly, by enhancing the“distraction effect”and by leveraging the“vampire effect”, the feasibility AD appeals and the desirability AD appeals could respectively moderate the impact of humor advertisement on consumers' subjective and objective ambivalent attitudes significantly. Based on the above research findings, it is suggested that enterprises can use humor advertisements to affect consumers by enhancing their trust in the advertising content, their positive cognitive understanding of the product, and their positive emotions when watching the advertisements. And by changing the means of expression of humor advertisements, enterprises can also achieve the targeted exertion of differentiated effects on the ambivalent attitudes of consumers.

Key words: humor advertisement, ambivalent attitude, perceived AD credibility, consumer emotion, AD appeal