2026-10-12T03:21:48Z https://api.figshare.com/v2/oai

oai:figshare.com:article/33936814 2026-09-18T15:59:59Z category_29248 item_type_3 month_year_09_2026

<b>Affect Transfer Revisited: Emotional Diversity, Comment Happiness, and Target-Dependent Brand Evaluation in Product-Review Videos</b> yunchi wang (25072786) Communication technology and digital media studies socialmedia online word-of-mouth brand computational communication science <p dir="ltr">This research examines affect transfer in social-media product-review environments by treating emotional diversity as a structural feature of communication rather than reducing emotion to average valence or intensity. Using 88 product-review videos and 45,392 matched comments, the study investigates how video emotional diversity relates to audience affect, target-dependent brand evaluation, and expressed electronic word of mouth. Video emotional diversity is measured as Shannon entropy across six emotions. Comment Happiness is derived from comment text, while the target-dependent brand-attitude proxy and eWOM measures are constructed through computational classification validated against independent human coding. All statistical analyses are conducted at the video level using OLS with HC3 robust standard errors, bootstrap indirect-association tests, multiple-testing correction, cross-validation, and influence diagnostics.</p><p dir="ltr">Higher video emotional diversity is associated with greater Comment Happiness, and happier comment sections are associated with more favorable target-dependent brand evaluation. These paths produce a positive statistical indirect association within the prespecified core testing family, although the conditional direct association between emotional diversity and brand evaluation is negative and the total association is not supported. The core evidence is also weaker under a more conservative global multiplicity correction. Exploratory analyses show that higher emotional diversity is associated with more avoidance-oriented eWOM rather than greater advocacy, as well as greater emotional entropy in the comment section.</p><p dir="ltr">The study contributes a differentiated account of affect transfer by showing that audience feeling, target-dependent evaluation, marketplace communication, and affective structure are related but non-equivalent responses. Emotional diversity may correspond to more positive audience affect while having different, and sometimes opposing, associations with brand evaluation and recommendation behavior. The research therefore extends affect-transfer theory from emotional direction to emotional structure and demonstrates the importance of matching computational measures and theoretical claims to the specific dimension of audience response being studied.</p> 2026-09-18T15:59:59Z Dataset Dataset 10.6084/m9.figshare.33936814.v1 https://figshare.com/articles/dataset/_b_Affect_Transfer_Revisited_Emotional_Diversity_Comment_Happiness_and_Target-Dependent_Brand_Evaluation_in_Product-Review_Videos_b_/33936814 CC BY 4.0