Livestream Assistants as Moderators: Dual Pathways of Emotional Contagion and Cognitive Reinforcement in E-Commerce Livestream Consumer Interactions

Focusing on the dual pathways of emotional contagion and cognitive reinforcement, this study explores consumer interaction mechanisms in e-commerce live streaming and investigates the moderating role of live streaming assistants. Using valid real-time panel data spanning 4671 min across 40 Taobao Live sessions, this research adopts the LIWC-based text mining approach to extract indicators of user emotional expression and cognitive expression from bullet comments and matches minute-level multi-source data for empirical analysis. The empirical results indicate that early emotion expression and cognitive expression are significantly associated with intertemporal reinforcement patterns, with emotional contagion being more closely linked to instant purchase decisions and cognitive reinforcement being more closely linked to user follow behavior. While assistant intervention is associated with a more active overall interaction atmosphere across the two psychological pathways, it is negatively correlated with product sales, suggesting a dual-edged association. By introducing human assistants into the analytical framework and empirically distinguishing differentiated outcome associations related to emotional and cognitive mechanisms, this study extends the application of consumer-behavior theories to real-time livestream interaction contexts and offers cautious practical implications for livestream operation and assistant deployment.