How Much Is Television About Manipulating The Basic Tenets Of Psychology?

I came across this excerpt in a book and it made me think about how effect television, other forms of media, and advertising is in manipulating people's ideas and people's mental associations of images. Psychologists are often used by advertisers and television show creators to help them implement the best way to embed their messages into a viewers mind.

"One of Freud's greatest contributions was a concept called Angstsignal, or signal anxiety, which anticipated some of the most sophisticated contemporary work on implicit memory and unconscious associative networks. Freud's development of the concept grew directly from his groundbreaking understanding of fear and the pervasive ways fear organizes human existence.

Signal anxiety, Freud said describes an unconscious mental function that operates as a kind of early warning system for the psyche. It's what, after you've been burned once, stops you from having to consider consciously the merits of grasping a red-hot poker every time you want to pull it out of a blazing fire. Seeing a red-hot pojer leads to an experience of signal anxiety. It's a straightforward danger signal of the distress that would follow were you to keep grabbing red-hot pokers.

Signal anxiety results from the perception of danger. But it's also about learning to associate one thing with another, often unconsciously." [SIDEBAR: Italics as emphasized in the book.] -From, "Extraordinary Knowing: Science, Skepticism, and The Inexplicable Powers of The Human Mind." By: Elizabeth Lloyd Mayer