Roles of emotional expressions in review consumption and generation processes

Abstract

This research examines how the relationship between review ratings and perceived review helpfulness varies when emotional expressions reflected in the textual content of customer reviews are considered. Moreover, we investigate how mobile devices affect emotional expressions in reviews with the same review ratings. We recruited participants from Amazon MTurk and collected online customer review data from TripAdvisor.com. Our analyses reveal that negativity bias exists in emotional expressions and applies to both the review generation and consumption processes. For positively rated reviews, negative emotional expressions are used more often and are perceived to be more helpful. For negatively rated reviews, positive emotional expressions are less used and perceived as less helpful. Our results also show that the reviews posted via mobile devices tend to be more emotional, for reviews with the same ratings. By showing the direct and indirect impacts of mobile devices, this research provides valuable theoretical and managerial information.