How Emotion is Communicated in Online Reviews: The Use of Linguistic, Semantic, and Parasemantic Cues in Negative Word-of-Mouth

• In Event: HIGH-DENSITY: Cognitive Processing, Social Influence, and Social Networks

Abstract

Social media offer consumers the opportunity to share their opinions, often emotional ones, with a multitude of people. To better understand how emotion is perceived in consumers’ complaint messages, this paper examined how receivers of negative eWOM interpret the emotion of the sender based on semantic, parasemantic and paralinguistic cues. An online experiment was conducted through Amazon Mechanical Turk and 428 valid responses were collected. The results of three-way analysis of variance (ANOVA) found main effects of all the tested cues, semantic (discrete emotional words), parasemantic (expletives), and paralinguistic (emoticons) cues, and a several significant interactions for the effects of cues on perceptions of intense negative emotion in the message post.

Authors

• Wonkyung Kim, Michigan State U

• Nora J Rifon, Michigan State U