What the Voice Reveals: Emotions and Sharing of Experiences

The Internet is full of reviews and recommendations but also rants about almost everything. Indeed, we may be increasingly reluctant to book a restaurant or order an item online that has not been thoroughly reviewed. But what drives people’s decision to share product and service experiences in the first place? Several studies highlight emotional arousal as a relevant factor for social sharing and virality of online content. According to psychological research, emotions are accompanied by a state of heightened physiological arousal or activation, which results from experiencing personally relevant events. Arousal tends to boost social transmission and can be reliably detected in the voice.

With this project, we provide insights to marketers on which emotions brands or products should be linked to trigger a positive "word-of-mouth".

In an experimental set-up, we analyze whether social sharing of experiences is triggered by intrinsic or extrinsic motivation and test whether this relation is mediated by emotional reactions. Furthermore, we analyze to what extend the persuasiveness of spoken reviews varies with the emotions of the speaker.

With this project, we provide insights to marketers with which emotions brands or products should be linked to trigger positive word-of-mouth. Our insights could additionally help to prevent damage for brands and products by knowing what emotions should be prevented. Lastly, our results could give a deeper understanding of how to make use of automatic emotion analysis software.