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Extant research shows mixed results on the impact of expressed negative emotions on donations in online charitable crowdfunding. This study solves the puzzle by examining how different types of negative emotions (i.e. sadness, anxiety and fear) expressed in crowdfunding project descriptions affect donations.

Data on 15,653 projects across four categories (medical assistance, education assistance, disaster assistance and poverty assistance) from September 2013 to May 2019 come from a leading online crowdfunding platform in China. Text analysis and regression models serve to test the hypotheses.

In the medical assistance category, the expression of sadness has an inverted U-shaped effect on donations, while the expression of anxiety has a negative effect. An appropriate number of sadness words is helpful but should not exceed five times. In the education assistance and disaster assistance categories, the expression of sadness has a positive effect on donations, but disclosure of anxiety and fear has no influence on donations. Expressions of sadness, anxiety and fear have no impact on donations in the poverty assistance category.

This work has important implications for fundraisers on how to regulate the fundraisers' expressions of negative emotions in a project's description to attract donations. These insights are also relevant for online crowdfunding platforms.

Online crowdfunding research often studies negative emotions as a whole and does not differentiate project types. The current work contributes by empirically testing the impact of three types of negative emotions on donations across four major online crowdfunding categories.

Current research suggests a positive link between followers’ perceptions of their leaders’ expression of positive emotions and followers’ trust in their leaders. Based on the theories about the social function of emotions, the authors aim to qualify this generalized assumption. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that followers’ perceptions of leaders’ expressions of specific positive emotions – namely, pride and gratitude – differentially influence follower ratings of leaders’ trustworthiness (benevolence, integrity, and ability), and, ultimately, trust in the leader.

The hypotheses were tested using a multimethod approach combining experimental evidence (n=271) with longitudinal field data (n=120).

Both when experimentally manipulating leaders’ emotion expressions and when measuring followers’ perceptions of leaders’ emotion expressions, this research found leaders’ expressions of pride to be consistently associated with lower perceived benevolence, while leaders’ expressions of gratitude were associated with higher perceptions of benevolence and integrity.

This paper theoretically and empirically establishes that leaders’ expressions of discrete positive emotions differentially influence followers’ trust in the leader via trustworthiness perceptions.

The purpose of this paper is to specify the role of emotions played in information seeking and sharing taking place in online discussion forum. To this end, an explorative study was made that focussed on consumer awareness.

The study is based on the analysis of a sample of 30 discussion threads containing altogether 1,630 messages available in Canadian Content – a major online platform. The expression of emotions was examined by using the categories of the interaction process analysis (IPA) model. Two research questions were addressed: first, what kind of emotions are expressed in the four functional areas of the IPA model when discussing online about consumer awareness? and second, what is the role of positive and negative emotions in information seeking and sharing about the above topic? The data were analyzed by means of descriptive statistics and qualitative content analysis.

Of the emotional expressions, 42 percent were positive and 58 percent negative. The most frequent emotions were amusement, contempt, worry, irritation and pleasure. The frequencies of positive and emotional expressions varied in the context of 12 IPA categories. Positive emotions predominated when participants showed solidarity or agreed, while negative emotions were particularly prevalent when indicating antagonism. The repertoire of positive and negative emotions was broadest while providing opinions or sharing information with others. In contrast, emotions were expressed rarely in the context of information seeking.

The study is explorative in nature and the findings are based on the examination of an online discussion group focussed on the issues of consumer awareness.

The study contributes to the study of affective factors in computer-mediated interaction by empirically specifying the repertoire of positive and negative emotions expressed in online discussion.

This study aims to test service providers’ ability to recognise non-verbal emotions in complaining customers of same and different cultures.

In a laboratory study, using a between-subjects experimental design (n = 153), we tested the accuracy of service providers’ perceptions of the emotional expressions of anger, fear, shame and happiness of customers from varying cultural backgrounds. After viewing video vignettes of customers complaining (with the audio removed), participants (in the role of service providers) assessed the emotional state of the customers portrayed in the video.

Service providers in culturally mismatched dyads were prone to misreading anger, happiness and shame expressed by dissatisfied customers. Happiness was misread in the displayed emotions of both dyads. Anger was recognisable in the Anglo customers but not Confucian Asian, while Anglo service providers misread both shame and happiness in Confucian Asian customers.

The study was conducted in the laboratory and was based solely on participant’s perceptions of actors’ non-verbal facial expressions in a single encounter.

Given the level of ethnic differences in developed nations, a culturally sensitive workplace is needed to foster effective functioning of service employee teams. Ability to understand cultural display rules and to recognise and interpret emotions is an important skill for people working in direct contact with customers.

This research addresses the lack of empirical evidence for the recognition of customer emotions by service providers and the impact of cross-cultural differences.

This research seeks to investigate consumer experiences of social power during service consumption. Specifically, this research examines the causes and consequences (cognition, expectations, emotions, and emotion expression) of consumer experiences of high and low power; and, given the key role of emotions in the experience and outcome of services, examines how emotions and emotion expression impacted satisfaction for high and low power consumers.

A sample of 195 adult consumers of a range of services responded to a self‐administered survey with a mix of qualitative and quantitative measures.

The data show that most experiences of power occurred in high contact services, underlining the social nature of consumer power. While high power experiences occurred due to consumer knowledge, service failure accounted for low power experiences. High power consumers have greater self‐oriented action thoughts while low power consumers have greater ruminative thoughts. There was no statistical difference in the provider‐oriented cognition for high and low power consumers. High power consumers expect providers to focus on the core service while low power consumers have expectations regarding the interpersonal component of service delivery. High power consumers feel more positive emotions, less negative emotions and greater satisfaction than low power consumers, but there was no difference in the expressivity of emotions. Emotion expression mediated the relationship between emotions and satisfaction for high power consumers but not for low power consumers.

This is assumed to be the first investigation of consumer experiences of power, an important construct in understanding of consumer‐service provider interactions during service consumption.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the emotional contagion theory in print ads, and expand the literature of smiling to different type of smiles and gender congruency. Emotional contagion happens when an emotion is transferred from a sender to a receiver by the synchronization of emotions from the emitter. Drawing on emotional contagion theory, the authors expand this concept and propose that smiles in static facial expressions influence product evaluation. They suggest that false smiles do not have the same impact as genuine smiles on product evaluation, and the congruence between the model gender–product in a static ad and the gender of the viewer moderates the effects.

In Experiment 1, subjects were randomly assigned to view one of the two ad treatments to guard against systematic error (e.g. bias). In Experiment 2, it was investigated whether viewing a static ad featuring a model with a false smile can result in a positive product evaluation as was the case with genuine smiles (H3). In Experiment 3, it was assumed that when consumers evaluate an ad featuring a smiling face, the facial expression influences product evaluation, and this influence is moderated by the congruence between the gender of the ad viewer and the product H gender of the model in the ad.

Across three experiments, the authors found that the model’s facial expression influenced the product evaluation. Second, they supported the association between a model’s facial expression and mimicry synchronization. Third, they showed that genuine smiles have a higher impact on product evaluation than false smiles. This novel result enlarges the research on genuine smiles to include false smiles. Fourth, the authors supported the gender–product congruence effect in that the gender of the ad’s reader and the model have a moderating effect on the relationship between the model’s facial expression and the reader’s product evaluation.

Marketing managers would benefit from understanding that genuine smiles can encourage positive emotions on the part of consumers via emotional contagion, which would be very useful to create a positive effect on products. The authors improved upon previous psychological theory (Gunnery et al., 2013; Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006) showing that a genuine smile results in higher evaluation scores of products presented in static ads. The theoretical explanation for this effect is the genuine smile, which involves contraction of both zygomatic major and orbicularis oculi muscles. These facial muscles can be better perceived and transmit positive emotions (Hennig-Thurau et al., 2006).

This paper aims to add to the current knowledge about conflict management by examining the relationships between conflict type, conflict expression intensity and the use of the conflict management approach.

The authors test theory-based hypotheses using a field study of new product development teams in an interdisciplinary Masters program (Study 1) and an experimental vignette study (Study 2).

Results show that people are more likely to respond to task conflict and conflicts expressed with less intensity using collectivistic conflict management approaches (i.e. problem-solving, compromising and yielding), and to relationship conflicts and conflicts expressed with higher intensity through forcing, an individualistic conflict management approach. Information acquisition and negative emotions experienced by team members mediate these relationships.

Knowing how the characteristics of the conflict (type and expression intensity) affect conflict management, managers can counteract the tendency to use dysfunctional, forcing conflict management approaches in response to high intensity conflicts, as well as to relationship conflicts and support the tendency to use collectivistic conflict management approaches in response to low intensity conflict, as well as task conflicts.

The authors examine an alternative to the prevailing view that conflict management serves as a moderator of the relationship between conflict and team outcomes. The research shows that conflict type and intensity of conflict expression influence the conflict management approach as a result of the information and emotion they evoke. The authors open avenues for future research on the complex and intriguing relationships between conflict characteristics and the conflict management approach.

The purpose of this study is to distinguish those emotions which customers express verbally during a failed remote service encounter from those which they do not. The study further attempts to investigate the post-consumption customer behaviour of verbally expressed and unexpressed negative customer emotions.

The authors used a survey-based research design. The hypotheses were tested through the “partial least squared structural equation modelling” method.

This study shows that in a failed remote service encounter, customers verbally express retaliatory rage emotions, such as anger and rage. At the same time, they are able to suppress rancorous rage emotions, such as disgust and contempt and do not express them verbally. The authors demonstrate that after emotions are verbally expressed during a failed remote service encounter, they are followed by the post-consumption behaviours of negative word of mouth and revenge; when emotions are not expressed verbally during a failed service encounter, they are followed up by exit behaviour.

The effects of variables, such as switching costs and individual and situational factors, can be investigated in the model. Future studies can also explore the role of organizational interventions, such as explanation and apology, on negative customer emotions during failed remote service encounters. Their moderating impact on customer behaviour during and after the encounters can be investigated.

This study has much practical relevance in the post-COVID-19 world, where remote service delivery is becoming the new normal in many sectors. In remote service delivery situations, verbally unexpressed negative emotions can remain undetected; however, they have negative consequences for firms. This study underscores the need to train frontline employees to notice these unexpressed emotions so that service recoveries can be initiated.

This paper contributes to the area of dysfunctional customer behaviour and service recovery. The existing literature has not explored whether some negative emotions are expressed during a failed service encounter and then acted upon later, and some emotions are not expressed but acted upon later. This study addresses the problem of firms getting caught unawares when they find customers resorting to undesirable post-consumption behaviour without demonstrating any verbal expressions during the preceding failed service encounters.

This study aims to examine the relationship between consumers’ emotional expressions and their self-construals. The authors suggest that because an independent self-construal can reinforce the free expression of emotion, the expression of extreme emotions is likely to become associated with feelings of independence through social learning.

The paper includes five studies. Study 1A provided evidence that priming participants with different types of self-construal can influence the extremity of their emotional expressions. Study 1B showed that chronic self-construal could predict facial expressions of students who were told to smile for a group photograph. Studies 2–4 found that inducing people to either manifest or to simply view an extreme facial expression activated an independent social orientation and influenced their performance on tasks that reflect this orientation.

The studies provide support for a bidirectional causal relationship between individuals’ self-construals and the extremity of their emotional expressions. They show that people’s general social orientation could predict the spontaneous facial expressions that they manifest in their daily lives.

Although this research was generally restricted to the effects of smiling, similar considerations influence the expression of other emotions. That is, dispositions to exhibit extreme expressions can generalize over different types of emotions. To this extent, expressions of sadness, anger or fear might be similarly associated with people’s social orientation and the behavior that is influenced by it.

The paper provides marketing implications into how marketers can influence consumers’ choices of unique options and how marketers can assess consumers’ social orientation based on their observation of consumers’ emotional expressions.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to demonstrate a bidirectional causal relationship between individuals’ self-construals and the extremity of their emotional expressions, and to demonstrate the association between chronic social orientation and emotional expression people spontaneously make in their daily lives.

The boom in live streaming has intensified competition among streamers for viewers' gifts, which makes it meaningful to study the factors that affect the viewers’ gifting behavior. Given the emotional attachment between streamers and viewers, the authors set out to elucidate a new driver on viewer gifting: expressions of the streamer. This research aims to explore the impact of streamer emotions on the viewer gifting behaviors, including free and paid gifting. The loyalty level of the viewers is also introduced as a moderating factor to investigate the heterogeneous effect of streamer emotions on gifting behavior.

The dataset the authors collected consists of two parts, including 1809.69 h of live streaming videos and 358,002 gift giving records. Combined with deep learning methods and regression analysis, the authors performed empirical tests on the 81,110 valid samples. Several robustness checks were also conducted to ensure the reliability of main results.

The empirical results show that streamer emotions do have effects on viewers' free and paid gifting behavior. The authors’ findings show that positive streamer expressions, such as happiness and surprise, have a positive influence on viewer gifting behavior. However, some negative expressions, like sadness, can also have a positive impact. Moreover, the authors discovered that higher viewer loyalty amplifies the positive effect of streamer emotions and reduces the negative effect.

This research contributes to the study about streamer emotions and viewers' consumption behavior, which extends the application of emotion as social information model (EASI model) in the live streaming setting. The authors carefully divide the gifting behavior into two types: free and paid, and study how these two types are affected by streamer emotions. Besides, these effects are analyzed within viewers of different loyalty levels. This study offers practical emotion management strategies for streamers and live streaming platforms to gain more economic profits.