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This paper aims to increase understanding of how emotional arousal could be used to enhance the adoption of new beliefs during a sensegiving episode.

Case study about the sensegiving tactics of a successful corporate coach and the reactions of 102 sense‐receivers. Data consist of 39 interviews, 95 hours of observation, a longitudinal survey, and informal discussions.

Two elements are recognized in sensegiving, which are: increasing sense‐receivers' level of emotional arousal; and cognitively associating that arousal with desired definitions of organizational reality. While the cognitive component determines the beliefs individuals come to hold, the emotional component influences how intensively they will hold these beliefs. Emotional arousal can be amplified in ways that are loosely coupled with the cognitive dimension of sensegiving.

The level of emotional arousal is assessed qualitatively through observations, interviews, and interpretation of open‐ended survey responses. Future research should use more objective measures for assessing the level of emotional arousal and replicate the findings of this study. In addition, future research should investigate different combinations of emotional and cognitive sensegiving that may lead to good results.

This study identifies a sensegiving approach that seems to work. Sensegivers can use these findings by first focusing on increasing sense‐receivers' emotional arousal and only then focusing on delivering their actual message.

Existing sensegiving studies have mainly focused on cognition and identity‐related dynamics and explanations. This study shows that emotional arousal is an alternative explanation for many of the previous findings.

This paper aims to investigate the moderating roles of emotional arousal levels (elevated vs mild) and emotional valence (positive vs negative) stemming from outcomes of self-regulatory goal pursuit in understanding effectiveness of the product attribute type on product evaluation.

Drawing on the literature on goals, emotions and behaviors, this research advances and tests hypotheses with two studies and an ANOVA.

This study shows that when consumers experience positive emotions stemming from the success of self-regulatory goals (approach vs avoidance), the impact of product attribute type on product evaluations is primarily driven by the emotional arousal levels and that the type of regulatory goals does not matter. In contrast, when consumers experience negative emotions stemming from the failure of goal pursuit, the impact of product attribute type is determined not only by the emotional arousal levels but also by the type of goals.

Marketing managers should use appropriate product attributes in advertisements that match with the consumers’ emotional arousal levels, emotional valence and regulatory goals by identifying customers’ specific emotional state and its source.

This study shows that emotional valence moderates the impact of emotional arousal levels on the effectiveness of product attribute types in advertisements, and that the regulatory goals as the source of such emotions matter only under the elevated negative emotions. The major contribution of this research is that to understand the impact of emotions stemming from regulatory goal pursuit on product evaluations, not only emotional valence but also emotional arousal levels and regulatory goals should be taken into consideration.

Clickbait has become a popular strategy for attracting online users by enticing them to follow the link to a particular website to read further. The purpose of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature by providing empirical evidence of how clickbait headlines affect online users’ emotional and behavioral responses, specifically emotional arousal and intention to read news. In addition, it is an early attempt to examine pupillary dilation response as an indicator of emotional arousal in the online news context.

An experiment was conducted primarily to examine the levels of emotional arousal evoked by two treatment groups of online news headlines, news and clickbait, compared to a neutral control group. Emotional arousal was assessed using two approaches – pupillary dilation response recorded by an eye-tracking device and the Self-Assessment Manikin (SAM) – and the results were compared. The influence of emotional arousal on intention to read news was hypothesized and tested.

The level of emotional arousal evoked by the headlines varies. In general, clickbait headlines generate a higher level of emotional arousal than do the neutral headlines but a lower level than the news headlines. The results also indicate that the level of emotional arousal measured by pupillary dilation response and by SAM are somewhat consistent. Emotional arousal appears to be a significant predictor of intention to read news.

This study is an initial attempt to investigate how clickbait headlines influence online users’ perceptions and responses, which will be of interest to researchers and news media publishers. The current study also provides evidence for adopting pupillary dilation response, an unobtrusive measure of emotional response, as an alternative methodology for future studies that investigate emotional arousal related to textual information in the online news context.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the interaction effect of placement characteristics and emotional experiences on consumers’ recognition of placed brands. Brand recognition is a fundamental step in the consumer’s decision-making journey.

The authors developed a research model based on emotional process theory and cognitive capacity theory incorporating placement characteristics, emotional experiences and brand recognition. An experimental study of 110 young Chinese consumers was conducted to test the research model.

The findings indicated that all three placement characteristics (prominence, serial positions and plot connection) had significant effects on brand recognition, as suggested in previous research. The effect of emotional experiences on brand recognition was comparatively less prominent. Placement characteristics and emotional experiences also interacted to influence the recognition of placed brands.

This study shows the role of emotional experiences and their interaction with placement characteristics on brand recognition, which has yet to be examined. The conceptual model contributes to the product placement literature by suggesting that both cognitive and emotional processing are important for brand recognition. The findings provide useful insights for marketers in designing effective product placement strategies.

This study aims to investigate how message sidedness affects the impact of fake news posted on social media on consumers' emotional responses.

The study involves a face-tracking experiment in which 198 participants were exposed to different fake news messages concerning the COVID-19 vaccine. Specifically, participants were exposed to fake news using (1) a one-sided negative fake news message in which the message was entirely unfavorable and (2) a two-sided fake news message in which the negative message was mixed with favorable information. Noldus FaceReader 7, an automatic facial expression recognition system, was used to recognize participants' emotions as they read fake news. The authors sampled 17,450 observations of participants' emotional responses.

The results provide evidence of the significant influence of message sidedness on consumers' emotional valence and arousal. Specifically, two-sided fake news positively influences emotional valence, while one-sided fake news positively influences emotional arousal.

The current study demonstrates that research on fake news posted on social media may particularly benefit from insights regarding the potential but often overlooked importance of strategic design choices in fake news messages and their impact on consumers' emotional responses.

Online retailing has attracted a lot of attention in recent years due to its great potential and significant implications for buyers and sellers. This study adopts the stimulus-organism-response (S-O-R) framework to illustrate how store layout design and atmosphere influence consumers' shopping intention on the website.

The sample for this study comprised 626 respondents from the internet users. A structural equation model was employed to identify the interrelationships of store layout design, atmosphere, emotional arousal, attitude toward the website, and purchase intention.

The analytical results of this study indicate that store layout design has significant impacts on emotional arousal and attitude toward the website, and thus has a positive influence on purchase intention. In addition, atmosphere has a more influential effect on emotional arousal than store layout design.

This study provides new insights into the influences of store layout design and atmosphere on consumer online shopping intentions.

For online experiential products, tactile attributes are important but hard-to-achieve features. This research aims to explore consumers' emotional experiences by incorporating tactile attributes into the online clothing shopping scenario.

This paper presents two online shopping experiments by consumers who purchase online clothing: one experiment involves subjects browsing clothing products on a computer screen; the other one involves subjects touching the clothing fabric while browsing a corresponding product on a computer screen. Based on the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) model, a physiological polygraph was used to record the emotional experience of subjects under the stimuli of “sight” and “sight + touch.”

(1) Subjects had a more positive emotional arousal under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (2) the visual merchandising of clothing and expected touch task affect subjects' overall emotional experience with clothing, and with a good visual experience and expected tactile experience, the subjects showed a more positive emotional valence under the stimuli of “sight + touch”; (3) differing from previous research, this experimental data only supports the hypothesis that the skin conductance indicator is related to the level of emotional arousal, without supporting its correlation with emotional valence. However, the heart rate indicator is correlated with emotional valence but not with emotional arousal.

This work proposes a way to study the tactile attributes of online clothing and enriches the theoretical framework of polygraph and the S-O-R model for the research of online experiential products, and in terms of application, it sheds light on sales strategies of online experiential products for retailers and brand owners.

Tourism destination marketers use videos that incorporate storytelling and visual and audio components to evoke emotional arousal and memorability. This study aims to examine the increase in participants’ level of arousal and the degree of memorability after watching two different videos.

A quasi-experimental study was conducted with 45 participants who watched two destination promotional videos. One video used storytelling whereas the other used scenic images and music. The level of arousal was measured using both tonic and phasic electrodermal activity levels. The memorability of each video was measured after seven days by testing the recall accuracy.

Scenic imagery and music videos were associated with higher-than-average arousal levels, while storytelling videos generated larger-amplitude arousal peaks and a greater number of arousal-evoking events. After a week, the respondents recalled more events from the storytelling video than from the scenery and musical advertisements. This finding reveals that the treatment, storytelling and sensory stimuli in advertising moderate the impact of arousal peaks and memorability.

These results indicate that nonnarrative videos using only sceneries and music evoked a higher average level of arousal. However, memorability was associated with higher peak levels of arousal only in narrative storytelling. This is the first tourism study to report the effects of large arousal peaks on improved memorability in advertising.

The purpose of this paper is to examine whether Pine and Gilmore's four experience realms (4Es) are affected by web site features; the 4Es affect consumer emotional components of pleasure and arousal; and pleasure and arousal lead to enhanced web site patronage intention.

For the main experiment, two stimulus web sites reflecting high experiential value and low experiential value were developed. Data were collected in a laboratory setting from 196 participants. An analysis of the causal model was conducted using the maximum‐likelihood estimation procedure of Analysis of Moment Structures (AMOS) for hypotheses testing.

Using AMOS, the results indicated that web site features affected the 4Es and three of the 4Es (entertainment, escapist and esthetic experiences) influenced pleasure and/or arousal. Pleasure, arousal, entertainment, and esthetic experiences had direct effects on web site patronage intention.

The results present an effective way to offer experiential value, which enhances web site patronage intention, to online retailers.

This is the first empirical research to investigate the holistic process of the effects of product presentation on consumer responses towards an apparel web site that there is a clear need for further study.

Online consumer reviews (OCRs) have emerged as a particularly important type of user-generated information about a brand because of their widespread adoption and influence on consumer decision-making. Much of the existing OCR research focuses on quantifiable OCR features such as star ratings and volume. More research that examines the influence of review elements, aside from numeric ratings, such as the verbatim text, particularly in services contexts is needed. The purpose of this research is to investigate the impact of service failures on consumer arousal and emotions.

The authors present three behavioral experiments that manipulate service failure and linguistic elements of OCRs by using galvanic skin response, survey measures and automated facial expression analysis.

Negative OCRs lead to the greatest levels of arousal when consumers read OCRs. Service failure severity impacts anger, and referential cohesion, an observable property of text that helps a reader better understand ideas in the text, negatively moderates the relationship between service failure severity and anger.

The authors are among the first to empirically test the effect of emotional contagion in a user-generated content context, demonstrating that it can occur when consumers read such content, even if they did not experience the events being described. The research uses a self-report and physiological measures to assess consumer perceptions, arousal and emotions related to service failures, increasing the robustness of the literature. These findings contribute to the marketing literature on OCRs in service failures, physiological measures of consumers’ emotions, the negativity bias and emotional contagion in a user-generated content context.