Faces do not lie: Examining the contagion of anger expressed in negative online hotel reviews and its mediating role in avoidance intention

Although still limited in number, recent studies have shown that emotions expressed in online hotel reviews may be transferred to prospective customers. However, this transfer has mainly been examined at the broader dimensional levels of valence and arousal, and only in relation to verbally expressed emotions. Building on this literature, our study adopts a discrete-emotion approach to examine the spread of anger from reviewers to prospective customers through their exposure to negative online hotel reviews, with the presence versus absence of anger emoji treated as the experimental manipulation. In addition, we test the impact of anger, as elicited by such exposure, on prospective customers' subsequent behavioral intentions. Participants were exposed to anger-embedded reviews, through experimental stimuli, and their emotional responses were captured using FaceReader, while their avoidance intention was measured through a questionnaire. The findings showed that exposure to anger-embedded reviews, both with and without anger emoji, significantly elicited anger in participants, which, in turn, led to their intention to avoid staying in the reviewed hotel. More importantly, exposure to reviews containing anger emoji resulted in significantly stronger anger and, subsequently, stronger avoidance intention. As such, our study extends emotional contagion theory by showing that anger, as a discrete emotion expressed in online hotel reviews, can be transferred to those exposed to such reviews and that the multimodal expression of this emotion can intensify the transfer. This points to the need for hotel managers to give closer and more timely attention to anger-embedded negative reviews, containing anger emoji.