2015/03/05 by Lisa A. Cavanaugh, James R. Bettman, Mary Frances Luce · 279 citations
Psychology · Social Sciences · #Affect (linguistics) #Communication #Compassion #Cultural Differences and Values #Emotions and Moral Behavior #Feeling #Gratitude #Pride #Prosocial behavior #Psychology #Social and Intergroup Psychology #Social connectedness #Social psychology #Trait
paper · doi:10.1509/jmr.10.0219
published in Journal of Marketing Research 52(5), 657-673 (SAGE Publishing)
openalex publication_date 2015/03/05 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/04
Marketers often employ a variety of positive emotions to encourage consumption or promote a particular behavior (e.g., buying, donating, recycling) to benefit an organization or cause. The authors show that specific positive emotions do not universally increase prosocial behavior but, rather, encourage different types of prosocial behavior. Four studies show that whereas positive emotions (i.e., love, hope, pride, and compassion) all induce prosocial behavior toward close entities (relative to a neutral emotional state), only love induces prosocial behavior toward distant others and international organizations. Love's effect is driven by a distinct form of broadening, characterized by extending feelings of social connection and the boundary of caring to be more inclusive of others regardless of relatedness. Love—as a trait and a momentary emotion—is unique among positive emotions in fostering connectedness that other positive emotions (hope and pride) do not and broadening behavior in a way that other connected emotions (compassion) do not. This research contributes to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion by demonstrating a distinct type of broadening for love and adds an important qualification to the general finding that positive emotions uniformly encourage prosocial behavior.