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Researchers in the field of occupational stress and well-being are increasingly interested in the role of emotion regulation in the work context. Emotion regulation has also been widely investigated in the area of lifespan developmental psychology, with findings indicating that the ability to modify one’s emotions represents a domain in which age-related growth is possible. In this chapter, we integrate the literatures on aging, emotion regulation, and occupational stress and well-being. To this end, we review key theories and empirical findings in each of these areas, summarize existing research on age, emotion regulation, and stress and well-being at work, and develop a conceptual model on how aging affects emotion regulation and the stress process in work settings to guide future research. According to the model, age will affect (1) what kinds of affective work events are encountered and how often, (2) the appraisal of and initial emotional response to affective work events (emotion generation), and (3) the management of emotions and coping with affective work events (emotion regulation). The model has implications for researchers and practitioners who want to understand and facilitate successful emotion regulation and stress reduction in the workplace among different age groups.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate a unique sample of lottery-like stocks and contextualize their short-run price behavior with respect to behavioral principles.

The authors conduct a short-run event-study of the abnormal returns for stock market investments in Australian small-cap oil and gas (O & G) explorers centered on the drilling commencement (spudding) of 157 wildcat oil or gas wells drilled between January 2000 and June 2010.

Small-cap stock market investments associated with newly spudded wildcat O & G wells are negative NPV gambles rather than fair (zero NPV) investments. Once a wildcat well is spudded, the 30-day expected abnormal return is 6-8 percent: wealth-maximizing stockholders are advised to sell upon news of spudding, but gamblers may wish to hold on for the chance of a 10.6 percent 30-day average abnormal return (if the well is not plugged and abandoned). In the lead-up to each gamble the authors observe a significant pre-spudding stock price run-up on average, perhaps indicative of positively affected investors aroused by an easily imagined successful wildcat gusher as per evidence on the influence of image and affect on investors’ decisions (MacGregor et al., 2000; Loewenstein et al., 2001; Rottenstreich and Hsee, 2001; Peterson, 2002).

The wildcat drilling events considered in this paper are lottery-like by nature, and spudding represents the distinct moment when the gamble is unambiguously on, following shortly on from which investors either strike it lucky or strike out. The specifically small-cap wildcatters are typically heavily vested in one well at a time, therefore the sample stocks are uniquely lottery like. This differs from other studies which infer the lottery-like nature of their sample stocks from characteristics such as price and idiosyncratic volatility.

Surprise has been recognized as a key process in humor. Past studies have seldom tested elements that could increase the surprise in humor advertising, subsequently increasing perceived humor and positive ad outcomes. The purpose of this paper was to test the effects of priming a lower arousal baseline before humor ad exposure. It proposed that this would generate greater humor ad surprise because of contrast effects, leading to greater perceived humor and positive ad effects.

Three experiments tested the effects of arousal and valence of primes on humor ads. Attention, perceived humor and ad effectiveness of the humor ads were measured.

Evidence of lower (vs higher) arousal primes leading to greater humor ad evaluations was found across three experiments. Felt arousal of the ad mediated the relationship between the prime conditions and perceived humor.

No study has focused on context effects of the unique process of humor ads. This study advanced the arousal theory of incongruity-resolution humor and further emphasized the role of surprise. The findings implicate that the surroundings of the humor ad could increase its effectiveness.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effects of pre-existing mood valence, mood arousal and ad-evoked arousal on response to television and print advertising. It combined the arousal-as-information and arousal regulation approaches into a single arousal congruence theory. It sought an extended application of arousal congruence theory in the persuasion domain with several novel findings.

Four experiments were conducted to test the hypotheses. Analysis of variance, multivariate analysis of variance and pairwise comparison were used for data analysis.

Consumer judgment is a joint function of mood valence, mood arousal and ad-evoked arousal. Positive mood does not always generate more positive evaluations and vice versa. Ad-evoked arousal can more strongly influence consumers’ judgments when they are in a negative rather than a positive mood. Furthermore, consumers in a positive mood rate a target more favorably when the ad-evoked arousal level is congruent with their current arousal state, while those in a negative mood rate a target more favorably when the ad-evoked arousal level is incongruent with their current state of arousal. Arousal polarization intensifies such congruence (and incongruence) effects.

The findings reveal a mood-lifting opportunity based on ad-evoked arousal. This has implications for the design of advertisements, promotional materials, marketing campaigns and retailing environments.

This paper’s findings highlight unexpected effects of stimulus-evoked arousal in persuasion when consumers are exposed to multiple emotional cues from the environment. The paper demonstrates the utility of an integrated model, explaining the relative importance of valence and arousal in influencing consumer judgments. It has been the first to examine arousal congruence, arousal polarization and arousal regulation mechanisms jointly.

The policing profession is associated with psychosocial hazard. Fatigue and burnout often affect police officers, and may impair the functioning of the organization and public safety. The relationship between fatigue and burnout may be modified by job-related emotions. While negative emotions have been extensively studied, the role of positive emotions at work is relatively less known. Additionally, there is insufficient knowledge about the role of the intensity of emotions. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of job-related emotions in the relationship between fatigue and burnout in police officers.

In all, 169 police officers (26 women) completed a test battery that assessed acute fatigue, burnout (Oldenburg Burnout Inventory: exhaustion and disengagement), and emotions (Job-related Affective Well-being Scale).

Acute fatigue was associated more strongly with exhaustion than with disengagement. Low-arousal negative emotions partially mediated the relationship between fatigue and exhaustion. High-arousal positive and negative emotions were partial mediators between fatigue and disengagement experienced by police officers.

The results show that high-arousal emotions were associated with changes in work motivation, while low-arousal negative emotions reduced energetic ability to work.

This paper enhances understanding of burnout among police officers and the mediating role of emotions. The patterns of the relationships between fatigue, burnout and emotions are discussed in the context of the conservation of resources theory and the tripartite model of anxiety and depression.

This study examines the effects of scent arousal on consumers' time perception in retail service environments and further explores how the effect is moderated by consumer-perceived stress.

A laboratory experiment (Study 1) and a field experiment (Study 2) were conducted to examine the relationship between scent arousal and time perception and the mediating effect between scent arousal and consumers' store evaluations. Another laboratory experiment (Study 3) was conducted to explore how consumers' stress modifies the scent arousal effect.

Consumers in a low-arousal scent condition perceived a shorter duration of time than those in a high-arousal scent condition. This finding was verified in a field experiment, whereas scent arousal affects consumers' store evaluations through the mediating effects of time perception. However, the impact of scent arousal on time perception was attenuated in high-stress conditions.

Time duration perception is an important indicator in the retail service marketing process. Evidence shows that underestimating time duration in the shopping process represents positive responses. This study extends prior research by examining how scent arousal influences time perception and how consumers' stress moderates scent arousal’s effect.

Drawing on the pleasure-arousal-dominance (PAD) emotion model, the emotional states of consumers embedded in online reviews can be described through three dimensions, that is, pleasure, arousal and dominance, rather than only the one-dimensional positive and negative polarity, as in previous studies. Therefore, this study aims to explore the effect of online review emotion on perceived review helpfulness based on these three basic emotional dimensions.

A lexicon-based method is developed to analyze PAD emotions of online reviews from JD.com. The zero-inflated negative binomial regression is utilized to empirically validate the study hypothesis. The authors examine the influence of pleasure, arousal, dominance, emotion diversity and emotion deviation on review helpfulness, as well as the moderating effect of product type on the relationship between all independent variables and online review helpfulness.

The study results show that the pleasure emotion impairs the helpfulness of online reviews, while the arousal and dominance emotions have a positive impact. Moreover, the authors find that compared with search products, the effects of pleasure, arousal and dominance on perceived helpfulness are strengthened for experience products. However, the emotional diversity and emotional deviation have opposite effects on the helpfulness of search products and experience products. Additionally, the results show that dominance emotion plays a more important role in the interaction effect.

The empirical findings confirm the applicability of PAD in the online review context and extend the existing knowledge of the influence of review emotion on helpfulness. A feasible scheme for extracting PAD variables from Chinese text is developed. The study findings also have significant implications for reviewers, merchants and platform managers of e-commerce websites.

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.

The multidimensional structure of boredom poses unique measurement challenges related to scale length and statistical modeling. We systematically address these concerns in two studies. In Study 1, we use item response theory to shorten the 29-item Multidimensional State Boredom Scale (MSBS) (Fahlman et al., 2013). In Study 2, we use structural equation modeling to compare two theoretically consistent multidimensional structures of boredom (superordinate and multivariate) with the most commonly used, yet theoretically inconsistent, structure in boredom research (unidimensional parallel model). Our findings provide support for modeling boredom as multidimensional and demonstrate the impact of model selection on effect sizes and significance.

This chapter looks into unpleasant affective states, or rather “dreaded emotions,” in leadership. Specifically, the adaptive roles and functions of fear, anger, and sadness are reviewed and discussed in a leadership context.

The social functions of fear, anger, and sadness are first presented. Following each emotion, the target of emotional expression – both other-directed (i.e., targeting followers and/or emotion-eliciting events) and self-directed (i.e., targeting leader) – is further discussed.

A symmetrical assumption has emerged over recent years that positive emotions result in positive outcomes and negative emotions lead to negative outcomes. In practice, the realities of organizational life and leader–follower interactions do not reflect such a neat juxtaposition. Positively valenced emotions can yield negative outcomes, and negatively valenced emotions can bring about positive outcomes.

Unpleasant emotions – fear and sadness, in particular – remain understudied in organizational and leadership literature, even though leaders experience these emotions just like the rest of us. This review offers ideas, through the combination of psychological and leadership research, on how social functions of dreaded emotions, including fear, anger, and sadness, can yield desirable leadership outcomes.

This chapter provides a review on unpleasant emotions (i.e., fear, anger, and sadness) that are rarely discussed and underresearched in leadership literature.