Date: April 25, 2014

Time: 10:00 am

Venue: Room 1002, Administration Building, Zijingang Campus

Speaker: ZHANG Han, Associate Professor, Georgia Institute of Technology

Topic: Should You be Fired Up If You Want to be Helpful? Curvilinear Effects of Emotional Arousal in Online Word-of-Mouth

Host: Prof. LIU Nan, Department of Management Science and Engineering, ZJUSOM

Abstract: This paper examines the impact of emotional arousal on the perceived helpfulness of text reviews. Building on dimensional theories of emotion, we propose a curvilinear relationship by which the arousal conveyed in a text review will be associated by readers with higher perceived helpfulness when arousal levels are low, but the marginal benefit of additional arousal diminishes as arousal increases. We suggest that perceptions of reviewer effort and rationality underlie this curvilinear effect. To test these hypotheses, three studies were conducted. In Study 1, we collected review data from Apple’s App Store, coded those reviews for arousal using text analysis tools, and examined the curvilinear relationship between arousal and review helpfulness. In Study 2, we utilized a restaurant context and solicited realistic reviews adapted to diverse arousal versions by participants in a pretest. Then we experimentally manipulated arousal and valence of reviews in the main study and measured the process variables of perceived effort and rationality. In Study 3, we manipulated emotional arousal in a more constrained manner and explored whether the impact of arousal depends on product type. All studies provided support for a non-linear effect of emotional arousal regardless of valence and product type. We found that arousal positively influences review helpfulness when arousal levels are low, and this influence is mediated by perceived effort. As arousal increases beyond certain threshold, however, the effect of arousal ceases to exist. This paper reveals the necessity of considering emotional arousal when evaluating review helpfulness, and the results carry important practical implications.