Males’ Responses to Negative-Emotion Advertising Appeals: Effects of Gender Role Socialization and Disposition Toward Rational Thinking

Negative emotions (such as anger and anxiety) arising from aversive consumption episodes are pervasive experiences in many service sectors, particularly in airline service, the focal industry of this study. Promising alleviation of or protection against negative emotions has therefore become an increasing viable theme of advertising. Not surprisingly, such advertisements usually use negative emotional appeals. However, studies of the effect of negative emotions on attitude and judgment and its potential moderators are few and far apart. This paper studied consumer responses to advertising appeals featuring anger and anxiety, two negative emotions that differ in agency appraisals (i.e., sense of mastery, control and power). An experimental study confirmed expectations that consumer response is a function of the congruency between the degree of agency conveyed by the emotional appeals and that tied to the masculinity schema defining the gender role orientation of the viewer, i.e., the congruency between high-agency in anger and high-masculinity schema and the congruency between low-agency in anxiety and low-masculinity schema. Specifically, high-masculinity consumers respond more favorably towards anger-based appeals than anxiety-based appeals, whereas the reverse response pattern is true for low-masculinity consumers. Further, gender and thinking style set the boundaries of the agency congruency effects. Particularly, such effects are stronger for males than for females and within males are stronger for individuals with a lower than those with a higher predisposition towards rational thinking. Implications to advertising and future research are discussed.