Impact Of Emotional Content Research Articles

Beyond stars: role of discrete emotions on online consumer review helpfulness

ABSTRACT Traditional Word-of-Mouth (WOM) literature shows that emotions embedded in advertising appeals or referrals/reviews influence consumer buying journey. However, there is a paucity of research exploring the distribution and impact of emotional content in “online” consumer reviews (OCRs). Hence, in this study, an attempt is made to examine the emotional content in OCRs and to study the influence of discrete positive and negative emotions on the perceived OCR helpfulness, by classifying them based on their valence and arousal. Further, the impact of the inconsistency between the star rating of a review and the qualitative review-related factors (i.e. emotions and valence) is analyzed. This study uses Natural Language Processing (NLP) and text-mining techniques to retrieve valence and emotions from 100,000 reviews from Yelp.com and employs model testing methods to verify the hypotheses. The results reveal that: (1) both qualitative/latent (emotions and valence) and quantitative/manifest review message factors (star ratings, word count) are important in determining the OCR helpfulness; (2) the difference in arousal (high/low) and valence (positive/negative) has a differential impact on OCR helpfulness; (3) within high-arousal emotions, negative-valence emotions influence OCR helpfulness more than positive-valence emotions; and (4) consumers’ perceptions of OCR helpfulness depends on the consistency between the qualitative and quantitative content factors.

The nature and impact of emotional content in congressional candidate emails to supporters

Previous research suggests that appeals to anger and enthusiasm increase voter participation but decrease deliberation and openness to persuasion, while appeals to anxiety increase information-seeking and deliberation but not participation. Thus, campaigns have incentives to consider the emotional nature of their communications with voters and to differentiate distinct emotions that share valence categories. We examine the emotional content of emails sent by candidates for the US House to partisan supporters and test the effects of these appeals on voter behavior. Overall, emails contain more enthusiasm and anger relative to a set of political “letters to the editor” drawn from major US newspapers and, in some cases, relative to a set of randomly generated “pseudo-emails” based on word frequency in typical discourse. We do not, however, find any consistent differences in emotional language across candidate or campaign factors, such as incumbency and competitiveness. In a unique quasi-experimental study fielded during the 2018 election, using actual campaign emails, we also find little evidence that the emotional content of campaign communications influences citizens. This is true regardless of whether we measure emotional content using objective codings or subjective judgments by human coders. We discuss methodological difficulties encountered in our work and possible lessons for future research on this topic.

The impact of emotional content on pseudoword recognition

The present study investigates the influence of emotional information on language processing. To this aim, we measured behavioral responses and event-related brain potentials (ERPs) during four Italian lexical decision experiments in which we used emotionally intense and neutral pseudowords—i.e., pseudowords derived from changing one letter in a word (e.g., cammelto, derived from cammello ‘camel’ vs. copezzolo, from capezzolo ‘nipple’)—as stimuli. In Experiment 1 and 2, half of the pseudowords were emotionally intense and half were neutral, and were mixed with neutral words. In Experiment 3, the list composition was manipulated, with ¼ of the pseudowords being derived from emotionally intense words and ¾ derived from neutral words. Experiment 4 was identical to Experiment 1, but ERPs were recorded. Emotionally intense pseudowords were categorized more slowly than neutral pseudowords, with the difference emerging both in the mean and at the leading edge of the response times distribution. Moreover, emotionally intense pseudowords elicited smaller N170 and N400 than neutral pseudowords. These results speak in favor of a fast and multi-level infiltration of the emotional information into the linguistic process of word recognition.

Empirical validation of a novel operationalization of the expression of emotion: A case of synchronization of relative pitch height and evaluative language across elements of discourse structure in a narrator with Broca’s aphasia

Empirical validation of a novel operationalization of the expression of emotion: A case of synchronization of relative pitch height and evaluative language across elements of discourse structure in a narrator with Broca’s aphasia

The effect of emotion on statistical reasoning: Findings from a base rates task

In this paper we explore the effect of emotion on statistical reasoning. We employed a base rates task to examine reliance on statistical information in the presence of congruent or incongruent anecdotal information. The impact of emotional content on statistical reasoning was investigated in controls and victims of sexual abuse. Two types of emotional contents were used, one generally emotional, and one related to sexual abuse. The latter category was included to investigate the effect of semantically identical stimuli that could potentially produce different levels of emotion in the victim and control groups. For control participants, emotional contents were associated with decreased use of statistical information and increased use of anecdotal information compared to neutral contents. Results from the victims group showed this effect to be increased for contents related to sexual abuse, suggesting that the effect is linked to the emotional connotation rather than semantic content. Victims perceived contents relating to their experience as more emotional and this was associated with specific reasoning impairments for these topics.

Impact of emotional content on discourse production in patients with unilateral brain damage

A picture story task was developed to examine expression of emotion via the verbal/lexical channel. The task elicited discourse with either emotional, visual-spatial, or neutral content and was administered to right brain-damaged (RBD), left brain-damaged (LBD), and normal control (NC) right-handed adults. Subjects were matched for gender, age, education, and occupational status. The brain-damaged groups were matched for months post-CVA onset and were similar with respect to intrahemispheric site of lesion. While the number of words produced was equivalent for each of the subject groups, the RBDs and LBDs expressed quantitatively less content than did the NCs. When content differences were examined within each subject group, there were no differences for LBDs and NCs, but the RBDs showed a selective deficit when producing emotional content. This finding suggests a special role for the right hemisphere in the production of emotional content in verbal discourse.