Anxious or Angry? Effects of Discrete Emotions on the Perceived Helpfulness of Online Reviews1

Dezhi Yin; Samuel D. Bond; Han Zhang

doi:10.25300/misq/2014/38.2.10

Anxious or Angry? Effects of Discrete Emotions on the Perceived Helpfulness of Online Reviews1

Dezhi Yin¹; Samuel D. Bond²; Han Zhang²

¹ Trulaske College of Business, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211 U.S.A. · ² Scheller College of Business, Georgia Institute of Technology, Atlanta, GA 30308 U.S.A.

MIS Quarterly 2014

This paper explores the effects of emotions embedded in a seller review on its perceived helpfulness to readers. Drawing on frameworks in literature on emotion and cognitive processing, we propose that over and above a well-known negativity bias, the impact of discrete emotions in a review will vary, and that one source of this variance is reader perceptions of reviewers’ cognitive effort. We focus on the roles of two distinct, negative emotions common to seller reviews: anxiety and anger. In the first two studies, experimental methods were utilized to identify and explain the differential impact of anxiety and anger in terms of perceived reviewer effort. In the third study, seller reviews from Yahoo! Shopping web sites were collected to examine the relationship between emotional review content and helpfulness ratings. Our findings demonstrate the importance of examining discrete emotions in online word-of-mouth, and they carry important practical implications for consumers and online retailers.

DOI: 10.25300/misq/2014/38.2.10
Volume: 38 (2)
Pages: 539-560
Language: en
Export: BibTeX
Sources: crossref