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The purpose of this paper is to study the nature and concept of emoticons/emojis. Instead of taking for granted that these user-generated formats are necessarily emotional, we empirically assessed in what extent are they and the specificity of each one. Drawing on congruent mood state, valence core and emotion appraisal theories we expected a compatible statistical association between positive/negative/neutral emotional valence expressions and emoticons of similar valence. The positive emoticons were consistently associated with positive valence posts. Added to that analysis, 21 emotional categories were identified in posts and correlated with eight emoticons.

Two studies were used to address this question. The first study defined emoticon concept and interpreted their meaning highlighting their communication goals and anticipated effects. The link between emojis and emoticons was also obtained. Some emoticons types present more ambiguity than others. In the second study, three years of real and private (Facebook) posts from 82 adolescents were content analyzed and coded.

Only the neutral emoticons always matched neutral emotional categories found in the written interaction. Although the emoticon valence and emotional category congruence pattern was the rule, we also detected a combination of different valence emoticons types and emotion categories valence expressions. Apparently the connection between emoticon and emotion are not so obviously straightforward as the literature used to assume. The created objects designed to communicate emotions (emoticons) have their specific corresponding logic with the emotional tone of the message.

Theoretically, we discussed the emotional content of emoticons/emojis. Although this king of signals have an Asian origin and later borrowed from the western countries, their ambiguity and differing specificity have never been analyzed.

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.

When the spread of online health rumors on social media causes public concerns, the public is calling for action. However, little study has investigated how Facebook reaction icons (expressing feelings function) affect online users' behavioral intentions (intention to trust and share) toward online health rumor posts. The current study addresses this gap by focusing on the effect of Facebook reaction icons in two conditions: Facebook reaction icons' presence (versus absence), and Facebook reaction icons' emotional valence (positive versus negative versus neutral). Moreover, the authors also investigated the interaction between Facebook reaction icons' emotional valence and online health rumor posts' framing headlines (gain versus loss).

The authors used a 7 (Facebook reaction icons: Love, Like, Haha, Wow, Sad, Angry and no icon) × 2 (Facebook framing headlines: gain and loss) between-subjects design, analyzing 507 samples from online users with one-way ANOVA and MANOVA.

Results show that online health rumor posts without Facebook reaction icons are more likely to negatively change online users' behavioral intentions than the posts with Facebook reaction icons; negative reaction icons (Sad and Angry) lower online users' behavioral intentions than positive reaction icons (Love and Like). Further, the incongruency effect of interaction (i.e. positive reaction icons with a negative message) would have more negative effects on online users' behavioral intentions than the congruency effect (i.e. positive reaction icons with a positive message).

This study has rich contributions to theoretical and practical implications for the Facebook platform and Facebook users to apply Facebook reaction icons against online health rumor posts.

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.

The literature to-date has focused on dimensions of emotions based on emotions’ affective state (captured by valence, arousal and dominance, PAD). However, it has ignored that emotional reactions also depend on emotions’ functionality in serving to solve recurrent adaptive problems related to survival and reproduction. Evolutionary psychology suggests that relationships with others are the key that helps individuals reach both goals. The purpose of this paper is to conceptualize, measure and validate the temperature dimension of emotions that underlies such human relationships, as suggested by frequent verbalization of emotional states via temperature-related terms (“cold fear” and “warm love”).

Across three studies (n_Study1a = 71; n_Study1b = 33; and n_Study2 = 317) based on samples from two countries (Germany and the USA) and using two different methods (semantic and visual), the temperature dimension of emotions is conceptualized and measured. Across a wide spectrum of emotions, factor analyses uncover temperature as an emotional dimension distinct from PAD and assess the dimension’s face, discriminant, convergent, nomological and criterion validity.

Emotional temperature is a bipolar dimension of an affective state that underlies human relationships, ranging from cold to warm, such that social closeness is linked to emotional warmth and social distance to emotional coldness. Emotional temperature is uncovered as a dimension distinct from PAD, that is, it is correlated with but separate from PAD.

In this research, a portfolio of 17 basic emotions relevant in everyday consumption contexts was examined. Future research could further refine the emotional temperature dimension by analyzing more complex emotions and their position on the temperature map. In general, this paper sets the stage for additional work examining emotional temperature and its effects on consumer behavior.

The results have strategic implications for marketers on which emotions to select for campaigns, depending on factors like the climate or season.

This research provides a better foundation upon which to understand the effect of emotions that invoke warmth or coldness.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this research is the first to conceptualize, measure and comprehensively validate the temperature dimension of emotions.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of emotional valence and intensity on sport sponsorship attitudinal outcomes, across two culturally different samples from Australia and France.

Based on a multidisciplinary literature review of the emotional phenomenon, research hypotheses are proposed and empirically tested against two samples exposed to two comparable major sport events in Australia and France.

Data reveal that Australian and French spectators' emotional responses differ in terms of valence, but not in terms of intensity. This initial difference, in turn, impacts the effect of emotional responses on sponsorship attitudinal outcomes. The more positive are sport‐related emotions, the stronger their impact on the sponsorship persuasion process. The proposed mediating effect of attitude towards the event is partially supported.

The results are limited by the small sample size and the inherent bias of the verbal measurement of the emotional phenomenon.

Despite omnipresence in sports events, emotions and their influence on sponsorship outcomes have not been clarified yet, once simply disregarded by many scholars. This paper provides evidence that emotions can contribute to the formation of attitudes towards sponsors, in some cases mediated by attitude towards the event. In addition, in line with the global reach of sports and sports sponsorship a comparison of results between samples from Australia and France creates a valuable contribution of this paper to marketing theory and practice.

This study investigates how media brand knowledge, defined as a structural feature of the message, influences emotional and attentional responses to, and memory of, news messages.

Self-reports, facial electromyography (EMG) and electroencephalography were used as indices of emotional valence, arousal and attention in response to 42 news messages, which varied along the valence and involvement dimensions and were framed with different media brands varying along the familiarity and credibility dimensions.

Compared to the no-brand condition, news framed with brands elicited more attention. The memory tests indicated that strong media brands override the effect of involvement in information encoding, whereas details of news presented with Facebook were not well encoded. However, the headlines of news framed with Facebook were well retrieved. In addition, negative and high-involvement news elicited higher arousal ratings and corrugator EMG activity. News framed with familiar and high-credibility brands elicited higher arousal ratings.

Relevant for both brand managers and audiences, the findings show that building credibility and familiarity both work as brand attributes to differentiate media brands and influence information processing.

The results highlight the importance of media brands in news reading: as a structural feature, the brand is used as a proxy to process the message content. The study contributes by investigating how the type of source influences the reception and encoding of the mediated information; by investigating the emotional effects of brands; and by confirming previous findings in media psychology literature.

Although governments have used social media platforms to interact with the public in an attempt to minimize anxiety and provide a forum for public discussion during the pandemic, governments require sufficient crisis communication skills to engage citizens in taking appropriate action effectively. This study aims to examine how the National Health Commission of China (NHCC) has used TikTok, the leading short video–based platform, to facilitate public engagement during COVID-19.

Building upon dual process theories, this study integrates the activation of information exposure, prosocial interaction theory and social sharing of emotion theory to explore how public engagement is related to message sensation value (MSV), media character, content theme and emotional valence. A total of 354 TikTok videos posted by NHCC were collected during the pandemic to explore the determinants of public engagement in crises.

The findings demonstrate that MSV negatively predicts public engagement with government TikTok, but that instructional information increases engagement. The presence of celebrities and health-care professionals negatively affects public engagement with government TikTok accounts. In addition, emotional valence serves a moderating role between MSV, media characters and public engagement.

Government agencies must be fully aware of the different combinations of MSV and emotion use in the video title when releasing crisis-related videos. Government agencies can also leverage media characters – health professionals in particular – to enhance public engagement. Government agencies are encouraged to solicit public demand for the specific content of instructing information through data mining techniques.

In crises such as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, governments need to act in time to lead citizens toward rational reactions and disclose information effectively to the public. This paper aims to understand the content published by the government and identify how citizen engagement relates to content type and emotional valence.

The grounded theory approach was adopted and nine types of content posted by the government were observed. The data were obtained from “People's Daily”, an official Sina Weibo account representing the voice of the Chinese government, from January 3 to June 22 in 2020.

The analysis shows that information related to emotional support and social mobilization were the most reposted, while those mentioning immoral and illegal incidents were the most liked and commented. Also, it was found that positive posts tend to attract more likes, yet with fewer reposts than neutral posts.

The authors adopted thematic analysis and focused on the impact of post content and valence on user participation behavior. This study expands the existing literature. The government can improve crises management capability by learning about citizen engagement behaviors on social media.