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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.

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.

This study aims to examine the underlying emotional process that explains how context-specific stimuli involved in virtual reality (VR) destinations translate into presence perceptions and behavioral intentions.

In total, 403 potential tourists participated in a self-administered online survey after they watched a randomly assigned VR tour. The Lavaan package in R software was used to conduct structural equation analysis and examine the proposed theoretical framework.

The results reveal that media content consisting of informativeness, aesthetics and novelty was positively related to users’ sense of presence in a VR tour. The effect of media content on presence was partially mediated by emotional arousal.

Managers and VR designers can create an emotive virtual tour that contributes to the user’s sense of presence to promote attraction to the target destination. The VR content needs to be informative, aesthetic and novel, which can excite users during the VR tour, portray virtual destinations clearly and eventually influence potential tourists’ visit intentions.

Research on the emotional mechanism to generate presence is still in its infancy. This study integrates presence theory into a conceptual framework to explore how media content influences presence and decision-making through the emotional mechanism.

The purpose of this paper is to test whether separate tense and energetic forms of arousal impact consumer attitudes and provide a more complete understanding of the role of arousal in product evaluations. Past consumer research has treated arousal as a single dimension and found mixed results of the relation of arousal to consumer attitudes.

Study 1 was an online survey of consumers’ experiences with interactive products. The study tested whether the two hypothesized types of arousal were associated with different product features and related to attitudes in different (opposite) patterns. Study 2 was an experiment in which the type of arousal used to describe a vacation location was manipulated. The study tested the role of the two types of arousal in determining the effectiveness of the advertisements for people with different arousal-related orientations.

In Study 1, tense arousal mediated effects on the ergonomic qualities of the product on attitudes, whereas energetic arousal mediated effects on the hedonic qualities on attitudes. In Study 2, effects of advertisements were primarily driven by the tense arousal dimension for more telic-oriented (i.e. planning ahead) people and by the energetic arousal dimension for more paratelic-oriented (i.e. spontaneous) people. In both studies, treating arousal as a single dimension would have led to misleading conclusions.

This research demonstrates that separating arousal into a two- rather than one-dimensional construct can provide greater insights to the affective mechanisms underlying consumer attitudes.

The purpose of the current study is to explain best practices for attempting humor in the workplace. Research on humor in the workplace has emphasized the use of leader humor but has neglected to provide guidance on how to successfully use humor. This is an important gap because unsuccessful humor attempts are associated with lowered status and disruptive behavior.

This paper summarizes three types of humor theories (i.e. cognitive, social and contextual) and derives principles from these theories that can be applied to improve humor success. Then, the authors apply the understanding of humor to workplace applications, providing suggestions for future empirical research inferred from the humor theories.

Humor attempts are most likely to land (i.e. invoke mirth) when they include a benign violation of mental schemas, societal norms or other expectations or when humor evokes shared feelings of benign superiority in the audience. Humor is less effective in goal-directed situations. Mirth is expected to increase group cohesion, leader trust and organizational identification and mitigate the effects of job stressors. Finally, employee learning and development activities (e.g. onboarding, training) seem like a good place to use humor to facilitate cognitive flexibility.

These suggestions from across psychological disciplines are synthesized to inform best practices for leader humor.

A pressing issue with mobile applications (apps) is continued use. The expectancy disconfirmation theory is employed as the theoretical basis for most studies on continuance. Recognising the experiential aspects of using mobile apps, the purpose of this paper is to extend the existing disconfirmation model to account for the emotional experiences and their influences on continuance. In particular, the authors are interested in the factors that drive the experience of emotions, and how these cognitive drivers differ in shaping distinct emotional experiences (i.e. positive vs negative).

Structural equation modelling was applied on 271 valid responses collected from an online survey conducted among mobile app users.

Disconfirmation affects emotions in a non-linear fashion through arousal, and both positive and negative emotions influence continuance intention. Furthermore, positive emotions tend to be influenced by inherent benefits, whereas negative emotions are more likely to be influenced by instrumental benefits.

The generalisability of this study may be enhanced by collecting data from more diverse samples and validating the model on more mobile app categories.

This study progresses from the demonstration of a mere impact of emotions on continuance as in several recent empirical inquiries to more nuanced understandings of the role of emotions in forming continuance intention.

This study investigates the influence of artificial intelligence (AI) stimuli on customer stickiness (CS), the mediation effects of social presence (SP) and the moderating impacts of customer traits in this influencing process.

Drawing on the arousal theory and social response theory, a conceptual model was established and tested by a data set of 268 customers in the catering industry.

The results indicate that AI stimuli, such as perceived personalization and perceived interactivity, positively affect CS. SP partially mediates the influence of AI stimuli on CS. Customer traits such as customers' need for interaction (NFI) and novelty seeking (NS) actively moderate the mediating effects of SP.

This study advances the interactive marketing literature from three aspects. Firstly, instead of focusing on the functional aspects of AI stimuli, it extends our understanding of AI-enabled interactive marketing by examining the effects of social and emotional aspects of AI stimuli on customer response. Secondly, it extends our understanding of social response by illuminating the mediating effects of SP between AI stimuli and CS. Finally, it provides new insights and empirical evidence for the research focus on customer traits in AI-enabled interactive marketing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of an employee’s consideration of future consequences (CFCs) in predicting employee task performance and its situational contexts (i.e. organizational support and supervisor support) based on trait activation theory.

Using a cross-sectional field study design, data were collected from 189 employees and their immediate supervisors in South Korea.

Hierarchical multiple regression analyses showed that employees’ CFC has a positive effect on their task performance. Furthermore, this study investigated whether this relationship would be varied by relevant situational factors. Consistent with the hypotheses, the relevance of CFC to employees’ task performance would be stronger when they perceive low levels of organizational support based on trait activation theory.

The findings suggest the importance of employees’ CFC on task performance. Also, organizations should pay more attention to the way of compensating for employees with low levels of CFC by fostering supportive environment.

Although researchers have been examined long-term perspectives in the business field, a few studies have examined its effect at the individual level. This paper identified not only the main effect of CFC on employee task performance but also the moderating role of organizational support on the aforementioned relationship.

Despite the growth of social networking websites as hybrid promotional tools, the empirical research that is currently available in explaining the consequences of gastronomy online reviews on ethnic food behavioural intention is limited. The purpose of this paper is to adopt a novel approach to explore Gen-Y tourists’ behavioural intention by proposing “involvement” as a mediator in improvising Wang et al.’s model. In other words, the more tourists enjoy reading gastronomy online reviews and gain benefits like inspiring taste desire, forming taste awareness and facilitating interpersonal interaction, the more they will become actively involved in searching gastronomy online reviews for ethnic food, subsequently manifesting in higher behavioural intention.

To test the research model, a questionnaire was developed and distributed to Gen-Y tourists in Malaysia using the purposive sampling technique. Partial least squares–structural equation modelling was applied to analyse the data collected from a sample of 748 responses.

This study provides empirical findings based on the direct relationship between gastronomy online review dimensions and the behavioural intention towards ethnic food. In addition, the indirect influence of the constructs for behavioural intention through involvement and the moderating effect of variety seeking were found. Indeed, when involvement increases as a result of reading online reviews, behavioural intention is enhanced. In fact, if the individual is a variety seeker, the behavioural intention could likewise be enhanced.

This paper provides suggestions and valuable insight for tourism authorities and ethnic food eateries in using gastronomy online reviews for promoting ethnic food and gastronomy tourism. For example, food eateries can motivate reviewers to include attractive and useful content by facilitating how the gastronomy reviewer retrieves information (e.g. ingredients, price, and food health value and food tradition) concerning the eatery. Additionally, rewards and incentives such as offering vouchers to reviewers in order to gain attractive and interesting reviews could be considered. Finally, the variety-seeking goal of tourists can be attained by relocating ethnic food restaurants or stalls at centralised or designated areas, where a variety of ethnic foods are conveniently accessible to tourists.

This paper systematically discusses how gastronomy online reviews influence the behavioural intention of tourists to taste ethnic food in the context of Malaysia. The inclusion of the mediator (involvement) and moderator (variety seeking) added a significant increment to the total variance explained in behavioural intention.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the influence mechanism of the word-of-mouth reputation of influencers.

This study explored word-of-mouth reputation from four characteristics of information source of influencers: credibility, professionalism, interactivity and attractiveness. The grounded theory was used to extract the characteristic indicators of influencers and used questionnaire surveys to obtain 218 valid samples. The fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis (fsQCA) was used for the configuration analysis.

The results revealed the following: (1) a causal asymmetric correlation exists between the driving mechanism of high word-of-mouth reputation and non-high word-of-mouth reputation; (2) influencers matching high word-of-mouth reputation comprises potential, developmental and almighty types, whereas live streaming influencer matching non-high word-of-mouth reputation comprises elementary and groping types; and (3) all factors must be combined to play a role, and neutral permutations of two solutions were found among the three overall solutions to attain high word-of-mouth reputation; (4) the combination of high user activity and high exposure is the core configuration that results in high word-of-mouth reputation.

This study provides recommendation for consumers, live streamers, brand and e-commerce platform on how to promote the sustainable and healthy development of influencer marketing.

This study focused on elucidating how the characteristics of information source affect the word-of-mouth reputation of influencers and have a reference value for the research on word-of-mouth reputation in the context of live commerce.