Abstract
This experiment revealed that emotional news frames (anger-inducing vs. sadness-inducing) affect people’s emotional response to a corporate crisis such as a cell phone battery explosion accident. The distinct emotions induced by different news frames influenced individuals’ information processing (i.e., heuristic vs. systematic processing) and the evaluation of the company differently. Participants exposed to anger-inducing crisis news read the news less closely and had more negative attitudes toward the company than those exposed to sadness-inducing news. Also, emotional frames affected how individuals perceived the different types of corporate responses (relief-focused message vs. punishment-focused message; emotional appeal vs. no emotional appeal). The advantage of emotional appeals was found contingent on how the crisis was previously framed by the media. Findings demonstrate a potential for developing effective corporate response strategies in a given crisis situation, considering the type of crisis, how it has been framed by the media, the publics’ emotional responses, and the use of emotional appeals.
Organizational crisis is defined as “a low-probability, high-impact event that threatens the viability of the organization and is characterized by ambiguity of cause, effect, and means of resolution” (Pearson & Clair, 1998, p. 60). Crisis communication literature has examined how an organization can effectively communicate with its key publics before, during, and after such crises. Although several studies have focused on various crisis response strategies, which are appropriate to certain crisis situations, Coombs (2006) pointed out that most studies examined crisis response strategies in an organization-based perspective, without enough consideration of the stakeholders’ perceptions. He argued for the need to examine stakeholders’ own perceptions of the crisis strategies used by the organization.
This study advances Coombs’ arguments by examining how publics perceive crisis situations in the first place. Based on the theoretical framework of framing research, this study assumes that the publics’ perception of a given crisis will be influenced by how the media describe it. Specifically, this study focuses on how emotional factors play a critical role in this process of crisis framing. Nabi (2002) found that different versions of news stories on domestic terrorism, each of which was designed to elicit anger, fear, or neither emotion, did induce different emotions. In addition, assuming that different news frames to a crisis would influence the publics’ emotional responses, this study examines how the publics’ different emotional responses would in turn influence their perceptions of the organization’s subsequent responses to the crisis.
According to Nabi (2003), a growing body of research has supported the notion that different emotions can promote different degrees of message processing (e.g., Bodenhausen, Sheppard, & Kramer, 1994; Nabi, 2002; Tiedens & Linton, 2001). Nabi (2003) refers to this notion as “the emotion-as-frame perspective” (p. 230), meaning that “discrete, context-relevant emotions selectively affect information processing, recall, and judgment” (p. 228). Specifically, Nabi (2003) revealed that emotions can serve a framing function, such that “repeated pairing of certain emotions with particular ideas or events shapes the way in which one interprets and responds to those events” (p. 227).
Based on her findings, the present study aims to examine how emotional news coverage of a corporate crisis (anger-inducing vs. sadness-inducing) may provide frames to influence people’s emotional response as well as subsequent perceptions. For instance, suppose seven people were injured in an airplane crash last night. If the news coverage emphasizes the airlines’ intentional negligence regarding the accident, anger might dominate people’s first response. On the other hand, if the news story focuses on the victims’ personal lives or their suffering families, people may feel sad. Then again, if the media emphasize that this kind of accident can occur again, fear would be the dominant emotion. Such dominant emotions elicited by the media coverage will likely influence the publics’ subsequent processing of the corporate response regarding the crisis. Consequently, understanding how the publics perceive, feel about, and evaluate the corporate responses would be critical when an organization develops effective strategies to manage crisis situations. Although researchers in psychology have extensively examined how emotions influence cognitive processing, it was not until recently that the role of emotions was examined in the area of media framing, crisis communication, and public relations. In the past 5 years, a series of researchers have examined emotional responses of the publics in crisis communication (e.g., Choi & Lin, 2009; Coombs, Fediuk, & Holladay, 2007; Jin, 2009; Jin & Pang, 2010; Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2007). Those researchers point to the potential role of emotions in the publics’ responses to an organization’s crisis response strategies. The current study will specifically focus on the emotions of anger and sadness, which we believe can play a critical role in a variety of crisis contexts. In this experimental study, a fictitious crisis situation was presented to two participant groups; one group read a story manipulated to induce anger, while another read the same information via the sadness-inducing news frame. According to the appraisal theories of emotions, anger and sadness should influence how the participants process the subsequent messages from the company and in turn how they evaluate and judge the company. This study will provide practical implications to develop effective crisis communication strategies, which deal with the publics’ cognitive perceptions as well as emotional responses in a given crisis situation.
Taken together, the purpose of this study is to understand how emotional news coverage on a corporate crisis could function as frames to influence the publics’ emotional response to a given corporate crisis and how the elicited emotions affect the publics’ subsequent information processing. Based on such understandings, this study also examines how an organization can develop effective responses in a given crisis situation.
Literature Review
Crisis Communication and Emotion
Crisis communication is defined as “the collection, processing, and dissemination of information required to address a crisis situation” (Coombs, 2010, p. 20). Over the past decade, the crisis communication field has grown rapidly, producing an increasing volume of related research. Since practitioners ignited the initial crisis communication research mainly through case studies in the 1990s, academics have conducted a series of case studies and content analyses based on specific theoretical frameworks such as the image repair framework (e.g., Benoit & Brinson, 1999). For a more detailed review, see Coombs, 2010. In time, another line of researchers began extending the crisis communication field through theory building and testing, so as to offer generalizable findings and theoretical predictions. Most notable among these efforts is the development of the situational crisis communication theory (SCCT; Coombs, 2004; Coombs & Holladay, 2002). Applying attribution theory (Weiner, 1986, 1995) to the context of crisis communication (Hazleton, 2006), SCCT examines how crisis situations (i.e., crisis type, crisis history, and prior reputation) shape the publics’ crisis responsibility attributions, which in turn influence their reputation perceptions (i.e., favorable vs. unfavorable evaluations), affects, and behavioral intentions regarding the organization (Coombs, 2007). SCCT then posits that crisis managers should utilize the threat level posed by a crisis to determine the appropriate responses, which would also influence the publics’ attitudes and their affective and behavioral responses (Coombs, 2010). A set of crisis response strategies (e.g., denial, diminish, rebuild, and reinforcing) was proposed “to repair the reputation, to reduce negative affect and to prevent negative behavioral intentions” (Coombs, 2007, p. 170).
Coombs and his colleagues did consider the concept of emotions in their SCCT framework (e.g., Coombs & Holladay, 2002, 2004). According to SCCT, stronger attributions of crisis responsibility increase stronger feelings of anger and schadenfreude (drawing pleasure from the pain of others), while reducing feelings of sympathy (Coombs & Holladay, 2005). The stronger the negative emotions (i.e., anger and schadenfreude), the less likely publics are to report behavioral intentions that are supportive of an organization (Coombs & Holladay, 2004; Rudolph et al., 2004). However, in the most recent SCCT model, emotion was posited to influence behavioral intentions, but not attitudes (Choi & Lin, 2009). More importantly, the SCCT model did not consider that diverse emotions elicited by a crisis situation can influence people’s responsibility attributions. That is, the model did not consider that decision making could be driven by both “emotions” and “logic,” to the same degree that the literature argues (e.g., Gordon & Arian, 2001). Thus, in order to better understand the role of emotions in crisis communication, it is necessary to examine how emotions affect the publics’ attribution process. That is, as Choi and Lin (2009) argue, “it is important to examine how attribution independent emotions, along with attribution dependent emotions, can influence outcome variables in SCCT” (p. 199).
Meanwhile, another line of researchers also called for an emotion-based perspective to crisis communication, suggesting that emotions are one of the anchors in the publics’ interpretation of crisis situations (Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2010). Jin, Pang, and Cameron (2007) have developed the integrated crisis mapping model (ICM) aimed at understanding the diverse emotions that publics would likely experience in a crisis. The ICM proposes that the four primary negative emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, fright, and anxiety) would be elicited by different types of crises, which would then influence the publics’ coping strategy preference and organizational strategy acceptance. The ICM model is meaningful for effective crisis management in that the model called attention to the primary publics’ emotional demands so as to develop an organization’s response strategies in accordance with the emotional needs of the publics (Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2010). Nevertheless, the ICM has room for development. The ICM and SCCT both emphasize that the publics’ emotions are shaped by the crisis type and/or situations. For instance, the SCCT argues that “the crisis type is how the crisis is being framed” (Coombs, 2007, p. 116). However, these models did not pay much attention to the role of news media in inducing different emotional responses among the publics in crisis. Considering that most publics will learn about a crisis from the news media, which can elicit certain emotions about the crisis (Choi & Lin, 2009), it is critical that crisis managers understand how the news media shape the publics’ emotions about the crisis. These emotions would in turn influence the publics’ subsequent attributions, attitudes, and behavioral intentions.
The current study intends to advance the literature on emotions and crisis communication by examining how the news media induce the publics’ emotions regarding a corporate crisis. Thus the present study proposes a theoretical framework of crisis information processing (see Figure 1), with special attention to the effects of news framing and the publics’ initial emotions elicited by the news coverage. This framework describes two phases: (1) how the emotional frames of crisis news influence the publics’ initial emotions, which in turn affect their information processing and evaluations and (2) how different types of crisis responses from an organization influence the publics’ credibility perceptions, blame attribution, and attitudes and behavioral intentions. Based on this framework, the current study will conduct an experiment to test whether and how the crisis news coverage can elicit differential emotions about the crisis from the publics and how the organization can develop the optimal response strategies to meet the different emotional needs of the publics. Before posing the hypotheses, the next section will first review the framing literature with a focus on how different news frames influence the publics’ emotional responses to an organizational crisis.
Model of crisis information processing
“Media Influence What People Feel”—Framing Theory
Entman (1993) defines framing as selection and salience in a news story:
To frame is to select some aspects of a perceived reality and make them more salient in a communicating text, in such a way as to promote a particular problem definition, causal interpretation, moral evaluation, and/or treatment recommendation for the item described. (p. 52)
Specifically, Entman (1991) noted that news frames may be emphasized through such elements as “keywords, metaphors, concepts, symbols, and visual images” (p. 7). In a similar vein, Gitlin (1980) defines media frames as “persistent patterns of cognition, interpretation, and presentation, of selection, emphasis, and exclusion, by which symbol handlers routinely organize discourse, whether verbal or visual” (p. 7). More specifically, Pan and Kosicki (1993) suggest four structural dimensions of news frames: “syntactical, script, thematic, and rhetorical structures” (p. 59). Syntactical structure includes the “headline, lead, episodes, background, and closure,” which means sequential and stable arrangement of words or phrases into sentences. Script structure provides a description of events and activities in a stable way, such as “who, what, when, where, why, and how” (Pan & Kosicki, 1993, p. 60). Thematic structures in a story consist of a main theme, subthemes, and supporting elements. Finally, rhetorical structure is related to journalists’ writing style, involving five framing devices such as “metaphors, exemplars, catchphrases, depictions, and visual images” (1993, p. 61). Although the term framing has come into widespread use, so much so that it now possesses multiple meanings in the research literature (Shen & Dillard, 2007), most of the studies seem to share a general conceptualization of framing: “The media can play an important role in influencing not only what issues are presented to mass audiences, but also how these are perceived, and what importance the publics should attach to them” (Durrant, Wakefield, McLeoud, Clegg-Smith, & Chapman, 2003). That is, the way information is presented via news elements can influence the way people perceive the issue.
While a majority of previous research on news framing has focused on the framing effects on individuals’ thoughts, opinions, or evaluations in terms of cognitive processing, Nabi (2003) called attention to the media framing effects on the audience’s emotions. Specifically, she proposed that a frame can promote particular emotional responses as well as cognitive responses. For example, in one study she uses a story about crime to focus on how a potential threat might elicit fear, while how another story with different frames might elicit anger. In another study, Nabi (2002) found that different versions of news stories on domestic terrorism, each of which was designed to elicit anger, fear, or neither emotion, did, as expected, induce different emotions from participants.
Similarly, in the context of political communication, a series of researchers (Brewer, 2001; Gross & D’Ambrosio, 2004; Masters & Sullivan, 1993; Nabi, 1998) found that emotional responses can be contingent on how the policy-related message is framed. In a similar line, Shen and Dillard (2007) found that different message frames (advantage vs. disadvantage) of Public Service Announcements (e.g., smoking, glaucoma, and pedestrian safety) did elicit different emotional responses. Lindsey (2005) also showed that different message frames of bone marrow donation advertising induced different levels of guilt feelings.
Meanwhile, the aforementioned researchers examined the framing effects on an audience’s emotions in a different message context, based on the common theoretical ground of appraisal theory. The main concepts of appraisal theory provide a helpful theoretical framework for the present study, suggesting that an elicited emotion itself can function as a frame to influence an audience’s subsequent information processing. This point is discussed in more detail in the following section.
“Emotion Influences What People Think”—Appraisal Tendency Framework
Appraisal theorists (e.g., Fridja, 1986; Lazarus, 1991; Roseman, 1984; Scherer, Schorr, & Johnstone, 2001) examined the process by which emotions are elicited as a result of an individual’s subjective interpretation or evaluation of important events or situations (i.e., “appraisal”). They viewed emotions as an individual’s automatic or conscious response, produced through one’s subjective evaluation about the encounter with significant events in the environment. According to Lanctôt and Hess (2007), although different appraisal theories vary regarding the number of appraisal categories and the detailed definitions of those categories, there is substantial commonality. Scherer (1999) grouped a series of appraisals into four categories: appraisals related to (1) the intrinsic characteristics of the stimulus, (2) the significance of the event in terms of the individual’s goals, (3) the individual’s ability to cope with the situation, and (4) the compatibility of the event with subjective norms. That is, an individual experiences “emotion” as a consequence of his or her subjective evaluation (i.e., appraisal) regarding an event as “pleasant or unpleasant, conducive or not conducive to one’s goals, as changeable or not, and as compatible or incompatible with norms” (Lanctôt & Hess, 2007, p. 207).
Han, Lerner, and Keltner (2007) addressed how specific emotions carry over from past situations to color future judgments in the context of consumer marketing, based on the Appraisal-Tendency Framework (ATF; Lerner & Keltner, 2000, 2001; Lerner & Tiedens, 2006). The ATF is one of the well-known appraisal theories, which is a “more nuanced emotion-specific approach” (Cavanaugh, Bettman, Luce, & Payne, 2007, p. 169). Lerner and Keltner (2000, 2001) proposed the ATF as a theoretical basis for distinguishing the effects of discrete emotions on sequential consumer judgments. According to the ATF, specific emotions can evoke particular appraisal tendencies that affect specific cognitive processing and, subsequently, decision making. Cavanaugh et al. (2007) argued that a significant application of the ATF to consumer behavior is that “the emotional consequence of one choice situation may then serve as an incidental emotion for a following choice (p. 170).” This proposition of the ATF provides useful insights for our attempts to examine how the publics’ emotional response to a corporate crisis influences their subsequent judgments. As the ATF proposes, emotions cause an implicit “cognitive predisposition” to appraise future events in line with the central appraisal patterns that characterize the emotions. The ATF summarizes these processes as “appraisal tendencies.” More specifically, Han et al. (2007) addressed the appraisal-tendency influences on judgments through two categories: depth-of-processing effects and content effects.
First, as for the depth-of-processing effects, Lerner and Tiedens (2006) addressed how specific emotions influence the depth of thought. Specifically, Tiedens and Linton (2001) found that high-certainty emotions (e.g., anger, happiness) make individuals feel certain about subsequent situations and lead to heuristic processing, whereas low-certainty emotions (e.g., sadness, fear, hope) result in systematic processing. Similarly, Bodenhausen, Sheppard, and Kramer (1994) found that anger (a high-certainty emotion) has been shown to induce heuristic processing and that sadness (a low-certainty emotion) leads to systematic processing. Small and Lerner (2008) also compared the effects of sadness and anger on welfare policy preferences and found that the differences in depth of processing in sadness and anger resulted in the differences in policy preferences.
Taken together, these lines of research are meaningful in that they demonstrate how emotions promote different information processing depending on the type of emotions elicited by the media message. However, these studies focused on the role of incidental emotions, rather than the message-related emotions, and therefore would be somewhat limited when applied in the strategic communication area.
Nabi (2007) proposed a complementary approach that integrates appraisal theories and framing theory to argue that message-relevant emotions are themselves frames that, once elicited, differentially influence cognitive processing and decision making. Nabi (2007) also noted that “the information made accessible from memory, the information we seek out or avoid, and the decisions that we make will be guided by the particular emotions (i.e., frame) experienced” (p. 385). Indeed, Nabi (2003) evoked fear and anger about drunk driving in a sample of undergraduates, and then examined how those emotions would influence participants’ information processing. The results revealed that those primed with anger vs. fear showed differences in their information accessibility, desired information, and policy preference, consistent with those emotional states. Nabi’s research provided empirical evidence as well as a theoretical basis for the current study, which intends to examine how relevant emotions affect individuals’ subsequent information processing and judgments.
Specifically, the present study will extend Nabi’s (2003, 2007) “emotion-as-frame” hypothesis to the context of corporate crisis situations by testing whether different news frames of corporate crises induce different emotions and in turn different processing depth (i.e., heuristic vs. systematic). Based on the appraisal theories literature, this study expects that the anger-eliciting news will promote closer (systematic) processing, whereas the sadness-eliciting news will lead to shallower (heuristic) processing. Therefore, the first hypothesis predicts the following:
Hypothesis 1: Anger elicited by corporate crisis news will promote heuristic processing whereas sadness elicited by corporate crisis news will promote systematic processing.
Han et al. (2007) addressed the idea that specific emotions not only influence the depth of thought, but also the contents of thought. Here, the “thought” refers to an individual’s interpretation of a situation and subsequent evaluations/judgments about the situation. In order to illustrate how appraisal dimensions of specific emotions influence the content of thoughts, Han et al. (2007) differentiated sadness and anger in influencing judgments of blame; while sadness tends to trigger appraisal tendencies to perceive situational control, anger tends to trigger appraisal tendencies to perceive individual control. Consequently, sad people attribute blame to situational factors, whereas angry people attribute blame to other individuals within the situation. When applied to an organizational crisis situation, anger-induced people would have stronger blame attribution to the organization than sadness-induced people, who would attribute blame to other situational factors than the organization. In a similar vein, Keltner, Ellsworth, and Edwards (1993) conducted an experiment and found that sadness and anger have opposite effects on subsequent social judgment. That is, when asked to make judgments concerning causality, sadness-induced participants perceived situational forces as more responsible for an ambiguous event than did anger-induced participants.
In the context of crisis communication, Choi and Lin (2007) argued that, after reading a news report about an organizational crisis, the publics will likely generate certain emotions about the crisis, and the emotions will influence the publics’ evaluation of the organization. Their argument was based on the emotion literature that emotions can function as information, guiding judgments and decision making (e.g., Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001). Choi and Lin (2007) analyzed consumer responses to the Mattel product recalls posted on online bulletin boards and found that the feeling of anger negatively predicted the perceived reputation (as conceptualized as favorable vs. unfavorable evaluations in Coombs, 2007) of Mattel. Their findings were in line with Han et al. (2007) findings, which indicated that in a negative event, anger-induced people perceive the related party more negatively, than do sadness-induced people. These literatures lead us to expect that different emotions (anger vs. sadness) elicited by different corporate crisis news frames would also influence people’s favorable versus unfavorable evaluation of the company. That is, after reading a crisis news report, anger-induced participants would evaluate the company more unfavorably as compared to sadness-induced participants. Therefore, the second hypothesis predicts the following:
Hypothesis 2: Participants exposed to anger-inducing crisis news will evaluate the company more negatively than will those exposed to sadness-inducing news.
How to Respond to Emotionally Framed Crisis: Crisis Response Strategies
A growing body of research in crisis communication has focused on how to use various crisis response strategies to protect an organization in crisis situations. Sturges (1994) suggests three categories of crisis response: (1) instructing information (i.e., telling the publics how to react to the crisis physically and financially) (2) adjusting information (i.e., helping the publics psychologically cope with the crisis by reducing the uncertainty and stress), and (3) reputation management information (helping the organization repair its reputation damaged by the crisis). Notably, most crisis communication studies have focused on reputation repair strategies, whereas instructing and adjusting information have been relatively overlooked (Holladay, 2009). That is, the vast majority of the literature (e.g., Benoit, 1997, 2005, image repair theory; Bradford & Garrett, 1995; Cameron, Pang, & Jin, 2008, contingency theory; Coombs, 2007, SCCT) has discussed various response strategies from denial to full apology in order to repair an organizational reputation in crisis. Meanwhile, as Coombs (2010) argues, “it is surprising how researchers frequently overlook instructing and adjusting information,” despite their strategic importance (p. 29). The current study calls for more systematic research to help crisis managers strategically communicate adjusting information with the publics in crisis. As reviewed above, adjusting information is given to reduce the psychological stress produced by the crisis; it includes the details about the crisis situation, explanations of what the organization is doing to prevent another crisis as well as emotional expression of sympathy or concerns for people influenced by the crisis (Holladay, 2009; Sturges, 1994). The purpose of the current study, therefore, is to advance the literature with special attention on emotions. This study intends to help crisis managers develop effective crisis response strategies to meet the publics’ emotional needs generated by crisis news. Our assumption is that the emotions framed by media coverage of a corporate crisis will influence what the individuals think about subsequent information from the company (i.e., corporate crisis responses).
Iyengar (1991) found that TV news framing affects attributions of responsibility for both the causes of and the preferred treatments of social problems. Nabi (2003) extended Iyengar’s findings a step further by exploring the role of emotion in framing not only individuals’ views of certain issues but also necessary solutions. As briefly reviewed above, in her experiment involving the topic of drunk driving, Nabi (2003) expected that, when the anger frame was primed, participants would more likely attribute blame to individuals’ behaviors and would prefer a solution such as punishment, whereas when the fear frame was primed, people would more likely attribute responsibility to the environment and the desire to be protected from harm. Her hypotheses were generally supported, showing that specific emotions can differentially affect information accessibility, desired information seeking, and policy preference. Nabi (2003)’s study was somewhat exploratory in that she elicited participants’ emotions by asking them to fill out a priming questionnaire rather than exposing them to actual messages on social problems. In addition, she assessed the participants’ subsequent processing by simply asking them to write an essay on the issue (i.e., information accessibility). She did not expose them to the actual messages concerning solutions in order to examine how differently they processed the subsequent messages. Nevertheless, her research findings provide helpful insights concerning how specific emotions influence individuals’ information accessibility, desired information seeking, and solution preference. In the context of crisis communication, Jin (2009) examined the publics’ preference of different organizational crisis responses, as a function of different emotions elicited by crises. In her experiment, participants read four different crisis news reports, designed to induce four distinct emotions (i.e., anger, sadness, fright, and anxiety). Then she measured the participants’ preferences of the seven organizational crisis response strategies from SCCT (i.e., attack the accuser, denial, scapegoat, excuse, justification, compensation, and apology). Findings show that when the primary emotion was anger, the publics were most likely to accept attacks on the accuser; when the primary emotion was sadness, the publics were most likely to accept compensation.
The present study intends to validate and advance Nabi (2003) and Jin’s (2009) research by using actual corporate messages, which are developed to cope with the publics’ emotions elicited by different news frames on the same crisis. Specifically, two types of corporate messages were created (punishment vs. relief) for this study. Both messages include a full apology from a company, but there is a difference between each message’s emphases. The punishment-focused message emphasizes how the company will accept full responsibility and be “punished” by the law. On the other hand, the relief-focused message emphasizes that the victims received proper treatment and are well now. Our assumption is that there will be a congruence effect between the emotion elicited from news frames (anger vs. sadness) and the corporate response frames (punishment vs. relief). Therefore, this study proposes the following hypotheses:
Hypothesis 3a: Relief-focused corporate responses will be more effective for those who read a sadness-inducing news story than those who read an anger-inducing news story.
Hypothesis 3b: Punishment-focused corporate responses will be more effective for those who read an anger-inducing news story than for those who read a sadness-inducing news story.
Emotional Appeals in Corporate Responses
A series of researchers (e.g., Forgas, 2000; Isen, Nygren, & Ashby, 1988; Johnson & Tversky, 1983; Lener & Keltner, 2000, 2001) have investigated how emotion influences the general publics’ crisis perceptions and decision making. Most of these studies, however, manipulated the participants’ emotional states (e.g., fear, anger, sadness) rather than employing actual message appeals. The present study intends to advance the literature by assessing the effect of rhetorical components, specifically emotional appeals, in corporate responses on the publics’ attitudes to a given crisis situation.
Heath and Millar (2004) propose a rhetorical approach to crisis communication that stresses the message development and presentation part of the crisis response. One of the foci of the rhetorical perspective is communication style, which is “revealed in the audible and written voice of the organization making the crisis statement” (Heath & Millar, 2004, p. 13). As Health and Millar (2004) argue, the choices of communication style available for use during a crisis would be limitless. Among a range of rhetorical devices, the present study focuses on emotional appeals. In crisis situation, emotion itself can act as information, guiding judgments and decision making (Loewenstein, Weber, Hsee, & Welch, 2001). Read (2007) also argues that the proper use of emotional appeals can help enhance organizational reputations and reduce criticism against the organization.
In the context of crisis communication, Choi and Lin (2007) called attention to the effects of emotional versus rational appeals in crisis situations. They based their research on prior literature that suggested that emotional appeals were more likely to be remembered (Flora & Maibach, 1990), and more effective in terms of attitude changes (Rosselli, Skelly, & Mackie, 1995). Choi and Lin (2007) manipulated two types of news stories (emotional vs. rational appeals) in the context of a natural disaster (e.g., upcoming tornados), which is often an emotional situation in nature. They found that emotional appeal messages led participants to higher risk perception, higher probability of risk occurrence, and more accurate recognition memory. Choi and Lin’s findings can be explained by a theoretical framework of cognitive/affective matching effects (Fabrigar & Petty, 1999).
According to Fabrigar and Petty (1999), researchers (e.g., Cacioppo, Petty, & Geen, 1989; Insko & Schopler, 1967; Rosenberg & Hovland, 1960; Zajonc & Markus, 1982) have speculated that an individual’s attitudes toward a given object can be based on affect and/or cognition. A series of studies (e.g., Bagozzi, 1978; Breckler, 1984) have empirically found that individuals actually differentiate between attitude-relevant affect and cognition. Based on this, some researchers have attempted to examine the relationship between the attitude bases and types of persuasive messages. For instance, Fabrigar and Petty (1999) examined how “the affective and cognitive bases of attitudes influence susceptibility to affectively and cognitively based persuasive appeals” (p. 364). Although the empirical status of matching effects needs more development, some researchers have empirically shown the affective/cognitive matching effects (Edwards, 1990; Edwards & von Hippel, 1995; Fabrigar & Petty, 1999). That is, attitudes based primarily on affect are more readily changed with affective appeals, whereas attitudes based primarily on cognition are more easily changed with cognitive appeals (Fabrigar & Petty, 1999; Petty, Fabrigar, Wegener, 2003). This may explain Choi and Lin’s (2007) finding that emotional appeal was more effective in changing people’s attitudes toward the emotional natural disaster as compared to rational appeal.
The present study will advance Choi and Lin’s findings in the corporate crisis context, under the guidance of a theoretical framework of cognitive/affective matching effects (Fabrigar & Petty, 1999). Our expectation is that, when a crisis has been emotionally framed by the media, intensive emotional appeals in a corporate response would be more effective than no emotional appeals or so-called “rational” appeals without any emotional tones. Since practitioners rarely choose either emotional or rational appeals as a clear-cut option in practice, rather using flexibly appeals in their strategic messages, the present study will focus on the use of emotional appeals 1 (i.e., presence vs. absence of emotional appeals), instead of differentiating emotional appeals versus rational appeals. The previous literature leads us to expect that when a corporate crisis is emotionally framed, people will more likely accept a corporate response when the message contains intensive emotional appeals (i.e., including the expressions and information that elicit, or make salient, object-related emotions) than when the message does not contain emotional appeals. That is, when a crisis has been emotionally framed by the media, a corporate crisis response with intensive emotional appeals will be more effective than a response without emotional appeals. Therefore, this study proposes the following hypothesis and research question:
Hypothesis 4: The presence of emotional appeals in corporate messages will positively influence participants’ responses to the corporate messages.
Research Question 1: Will there be an interaction effect between news frames (anger vs. sadness) and emotional appeals (presence vs. absence) in participants’ attitudes toward the company?
Method
Design
In this study, a 2 × 2 × 2 between-subject design experiment was conducted. The first independent variable was a type of news frame (anger-inducing vs. sadness-inducing), and the second was a type of corporate response toward the crisis (punishment-focused vs. relief-focused). The last independent variable was the presence of intensive emotional appeals in corporate responses (presence vs. absence). Dependent variables included participants’ emotional states at two different stages (after a news story presentation and after a corporate response presentation), the depth of message processing, corporate response credibility, degrees of blame attributions, attitudes toward the company, and future behavioral intentions.
Participants
The participants were 240 undergraduate students from a large Midwestern university. Students participated in this experimental study for extra credit, and the participant pool was 73.8% female. Each participant was randomly assigned to one of the eight experimental conditions.
Stimulus
The crisis type for this experiment was a technical error accident (i.e., an occurring crisis when equipment or technology failure results in a defective product), which has been most frequently studied in previous crisis communication research (An & Cheng, 2010). Specifically, this study adopts a cell phone battery explosion accident, which would be a familiar and involving topic for college students (DeBaillon & Rockwell, 2005; Jin & Pena, 2010; Kim, Kim, & Cameron, 2009). The cell phone company was fictitious because the level of prior reputation needed to be controlled, according to the crisis communication literature. 2 Thus this study employed a GeoTech cell phone battery explosion accident, which has been successfully used to induce college students’ responses about the crisis event in a prior study (Kim, Kim, & Cameron, 2009).
Based on Nabi’s (2002) previous research, a fictitious news story was developed to induce either anger or sadness about a corporate crisis situation by emphasizing information related to each emotion’s core relational theme. That is, anger-inducing news emphasized the transgression of a company (i.e., the company’s intentional wrongdoing), whereas sadness-inducing news focused on suffering victims (i.e., crisis victims’ personal lives and suffering). The contents regarding the basic crisis information were kept identical across the conditions. The manipulation of emotion inducement was successfully pretested with 63 undergraduate students.
The corporate responses were manipulated to produce four types of messages: Response types (punishment-focused vs. relief-focused) × Emotional appeals (presence vs. absence). The response type was manipulated by emphasizing information related to each emotion’s core coping theme—punishment for anger (i.e., the company being punished by the law) and relief for sadness (i.e., surgery for the victim was successful, and the victims will receive fair compensations). The length and contents of the messages were kept identical except for the headlines (e.g., GeoTech Takes Full Responsibility for Its Flawed Products vs. GeoTech Takes Full Responsibility for the Burn Victims) and the contents of the second paragraphs. In the punishment-focused response, the paragraph emphasized that the company fully cooperated with the Consumer Product Safety Commission in its investigation and understood its responsibility for the incidents; the company accepted full responsibility for the accidents and agreed to implement whatever the law requires it to do. On the other hand, the relief-focused response emphasizes that the company will take full responsibility for the victims and will do whatever it takes to ensure that they receive adequate treatments; victims with minor burns, who have been completely healed, will be compensated for their sufferings. The presence versus absence of emotional appeals were manipulated based on Rosselli and his colleagues’ (1995) conceptualization, by including the words that make salient crisis-related emotions and that emphasize linkages to people. These response messages were also pretested to ensure the successful manipulations of the independent factor, by asking participants (n = 63) to rate the emotional tone of the message on a 7-point Likert-type scale, as adapted from Choi and Lin’s study (2007).
Experimental Procedure
As stated earlier, this study had a multiphase design: Phase I—the inducement of two types of emotional states via a crisis news story (anger vs. sadness), Phase II—the manipulation of corporate response message factors (punishment-focused with emotional appeals vs. relief-focused with emotional appeals vs. punishment-focused without emotional appeals vs. relief-focused without emotional appeals).
Phase I
Once the experiment began, participants were asked to read a news story containing crisis information that describes a current situation regarding a crisis breakout (i.e., cell phone battery explosions). They were then asked to answer questions designed to measure their emotional states, message elaboration, and attitudes toward the company.
Phase II
Once participants finished the questionnaire, the second phase began; a participant read one of the four types of corporate response messages: Response types (punishment vs. relief) × Emotional appeals (presence vs. absence), attributed to Immediate Press Release from the company. Participants were told that the corporate message was released on the following day after the first breaking news about the cell phone battery explosions. After reading the article, participants were asked to answer the second questionnaire designed to measure their emotional states, credibility perceptions, degree of blame attribution, attitudes toward the company, and future behavioral intentions.
Measures—Phase I
Emotions measure
At phase I, participants’ emotional responses were measured to assess whether the target emotions (anger vs. sadness) were successfully induced. Based on the previous work of Dillard and his colleagues (Dillard, Plotnick, Godbold, Freimuth, & Edgar, 1996; Smith & Dillard, 1997), this study developed a 17-item emotions measure. Immediately after reading the crisis news story, participants were asked to rate how much of each emotion they felt while reading the news story. The study used a 7-point scale ranging from not at all to very much for each item: afraid, scared, fearful, angry, irritated, annoyed, aggravated, sad, dreary, dismal, surprised, startled, disgusted, sickened, revolted, agitated, and empathy (see Table 1 for the mean scores).
Means and Standard Deviations of the Emotions Scales
Note: N = 240.
Message elaboration
The depth of processing was measured by Chow and Luk’s (2006) scale. The scale included three items: “The extent to which I thought about the news story is,” “The time I spent on thinking about the news story,” “The amount of attention I paid to the news story is.” Participants were asked to rate each item using a 7-point Likert-type scale. The index (M = 3.76, SD = 1.26) produced acceptable reliability (α = .81).
Initial attitudes toward the company
Participants’ initial attitudes toward the company after reading the crisis news report were measured by MacKenzie and Lutz (1989). The scale was composed of three items (good-bad, favorable-unfavorable, and pleasant-unpleasant) on 7-point semantic differential scales. The index (M = 2.20, SD = 1.07) produced acceptable reliability (α = .86).
Measures—Phase II
Credibility perceptions
Corporate message credibility was defined as the degree to which a message is perceived as believable and convincing. It was measured by six items on a 7-point semantic differential scale: unbiased-biased, accurate-inaccurate, believable-unbelievable, convincing-unconvincing, trustworthy-untrustworthy, and telling the whole story–not telling the whole story (Ohanian, 1990). The index (M = 3.88, SD = 1.30) was quite reliable (α = .94). Corporate credibility was measured by six items on a 7-point semantic differential scale: reliable-unreliable, sincere-insincere, trustworthy-untrustworthy, honest-dishonest, believable-unbelievable, experienced-inexperienced, and expert-not expert (Newell & Goldsmith, 2001; Ohanian, 1990). The index (M = 3.63, SD = 1.35) was also reliable (α = .92).
Blame attributions
Blame was defined as the attribution made after the perceiver assesses and does not accept the validity of the responsible party’s excuses or explanations (Shaver & Drown, 1986). Blame attribution to the organization was measured using a scale that Malhotra and Kuo (2009) used for their study on emotions and blame attributions. Participants were asked to answer to the question, “To what extent do you think GeoTech should be blamed for the incident?” This item was measured on a 7-point Likert-type scale, ranging from 1(not at all) to 7(very much) (M = 4.45, SD = 1.58). 3
Attitudes toward the company
Participants’ attitudes toward the company after reading the crisis responses were measured by three items on 7-point semantic differential scales: good-bad, favorable-unfavorable, and pleasant-unpleasant (MacKenzie & Lutz, 1989). The index (M = 3.11, SD = 1.32) was quite reliable (α = .96). 4
Behavioral intentions
Participants’ future behavioral intentions regarding the company were measured based on the scale adopted by Lyon and Cameron (2004). Participants were asked to estimate the likelihood of each of the three items on a 7-point Likert-type scale: I would purchase the products of GeoTech if I have the opportunity in the future; I would invest in GeoTech if I have the opportunity in the future; I would recommend GeoTech’s products to a friend if I have the opportunity in the future. The index (M = 2.12, SD = 1.17) was quite reliable (α = .94).
Control variables
In addition, several potential extraneous variables were assessed. Specifically, participants’ initial mood states before news story presentations (M = 1.30, SD = 1.47), issue involvement (M = 4.71, SD = 1.41), gender, and age (M = 19.55, SD = 1.45) were measured as possible control variables.
Results
Preliminary Analyses
Emotions measures
As addressed earlier, participants’ emotional responses to the news story were measured using a series of items drawn largely from the previous work of Dillard and his colleagues (Dillard, 1997; Dillard et al., 1996). Factor analysis was conducted to reduce the data and find the minimum number of factors that account for observed emotions. As a result, four factors emerged. The unidimensional emotion scales and their corresponding items were the following: Anger (angry, irritated, aggravated, α = .93), Sadness (sadness, empathy, α = .79), Fear (scared, fearful, afraid, α = .97), and Surprise 5 (surprised, startled, α = .84).
Manipulation check
The validity of the independent variables manipulation was checked by independent t tests. A manipulation check of news frames (anger vs. sadness) was conducted by using the emotion factor scores produced from the previous factor analysis. The t test revealed that there was a significant difference between anger-inducing news group and sadness-inducing news group in their emotion factor scores (for Anger factor, anger-inducing group M = .145, SD = .95 vs. sadness-inducing group M =−.161, SD = 1.03, Mdiff = .306, t(216) = 2.28, p = .012; for Sadness factor, anger-inducing news group M = −.366, SD = .94 vs. sadness-inducing group M = .408, SD = .90, Mdiff = −.775, t(216) = −6.18, p = .000). 6 A manipulation for emotional appeals was also assessed by participants’ response to the item, This message is primarily emotional, ranging from 1 = strongly disagree to 7 = strongly agree, as adapted from Choi and Lin’s study (2007). The t test analysis revealed that there was a significant difference between the two groups, absence of emotional appeals (M = 3.36, SD = 1.61) versus presence of emotional appeals (M = 3.93, SD = 1.75), and the manipulation for emotional appeals was successful: Mdiff = −.56, t(237) = −2.59, p = .005.
Blame attribution
Primary analysis of the data suggested that the distribution of the blame attribution was negatively skewed, indicating the scores bunched up on the high end of the scale (a skewness statistic of −1.201 with standard errors of skewness of .159). Values of 2 standard errors of skewness or more are considered skewed to a significant degree. To address the skewed distribution, a square root function transformation was conducted. The square root function transformation reduces the skewness by compressing the negative and positive tails of the distribution (Nolan & Heinzen, 2008).
Tests of the Hypotheses
Hypothesis 1 predicted that specific emotions elicited by different corporate crisis news frames would influence the depth of processing of the news, such that anger elicited by the crisis news would promote heuristic processing, whereas sadness elicited by the crisis news would promote systematic processing. The ANOVA test revealed that there was a significant difference between anger-inducing news group and sadness-inducing news group in the depth of processing of the news (p = .000, η p 2 = .053). That is, those exposed to sadness-inducing news were more likely to read the news closely with much attention (M = 4.05, SD = 1.23) as compared to those exposed to anger-inducing news (M = 3.47, SD = 1.23). Thus Hypothesis 1 was supported.
Hypothesis 2 predicted that participants exposed to anger-inducing crisis news would have more negative attitudes toward the company than would those exposed to sadness-inducing news. The ANOVA test revealed that there was a significant difference between the anger-inducing news group and sadness-inducing news group in their attitudes toward the company (p = .018, η p 2 = .023). That is, those exposed to anger-inducing news tended to have more negative attitudes toward the responsible company (M = 2.03, SD = 1.00) than those exposed to sadness-inducing news (M = 2.36, SD = 1.13), even though the contents regarding the crisis situation were identical between the two groups. Thus, Hypothesis 2 was supported.
Next, the subsequent analyses for Phase II (i.e., H3, H4, & RQ1) were conducted using ANCOVAs with participants’ initial mood states as a covariate in order to control for the effects of the extraneous variable on participants’ responses to corporate messages. First, Hypothesis 3 (H3a & H3b) predicted that relief-focused corporate response would be more effective for those who read a sadness-inducing news story, whereas punishment-focused response would be more effective for the anger-inducing news readers. In order to test H3a and H3b, a series of ANCOVAs were conducted on participants’ response toward the corporate messages. Results revealed that those who read the sadness-inducing news tended to perceive the corporate response as more credible when it focused on relief (M = 4.33, SD = 1.42) over punishment (M = 3.91, SD = 1.34), supporting H3a F(1, 224) = 4.55, p = .03. The mean patterns were similar for other dependent variables (for corporate credibility, M = 4.01 vs. M = 3.77; for attitudes toward company, M = 3.25 vs. M = 3.06) although the mean differences were not statistically significant. On the other hand, the relief-focused response was found effective for those who read the anger-inducing news as well, as opposed to our expectation (H3b). That is, those who read the anger-inducing news tended to perceive the corporate response as more credible when it focused on relief (M = 3.84, SD = 1.17) over punishment (M = 3.49, SD = 1.21). Taken together, there was the main effect of relief-focused response over punishment-focused response on participants’ credibility perceptions regardless of the initial news frame type η p 2 = .02). Thus Hypothesis 3a was supported, while Hypothesis 3b was not supported.
H4 proposed that the presence of emotional appeals in corporate messages would positively influence participants’ responses to the messages, while RQ1 posed a question of whether there would be an interaction effect between news frames (anger vs. sadness) and emotional appeals (presence vs. absence). A series of ANCOVAs were conducted with the participant’s initial mood states as the covariate, and credibility perceptions, attitudes toward the company, and behavioral intentions as the dependent variables. Consistent with H4, the ANCOVAs revealed that those who read the message with intensive emotional appeals tended to have higher behavioral intentions (M = 2.34, SD = 1.18) as compared to those who read the message with no emotional appeals, M = 1.92, SD = 1.14, F(1, 223) = 7.05, p = .008, η p 2 = .031. The mean patterns were similar for other dependent variables, for corporate credibility, M = 3.75 (SD = 1.45) vs. M = 3.53 (SD = 1.75); for attitudes toward the company, M = 3.23 (SD = 1.40) vs. M = 3.00 (SD = 1.24) although the difference fell short of the p < .05 significance level. Thus, Hypothesis 4 was partially supported.
As for RQ1, although the interaction effect between news frames and emotional appeals on participants’ credibility perceptions did not reach the statistically significant level at p < .05 of the ANCOVA analysis, the Bonferroni pair-wise comparisons test indicated that there was a significant mean difference between the anger-inducing news group and the sadness-inducing news group in responding to intensive emotional appeals. That is, those in the sadness-inducing news group were more likely to perceive the corporate message with intensive emotional appeals as credible, as compared those in the anger-inducing news group (Mdiff = .684, SE = .243, p = .005). In the no emotional appeal condition, however, there was no significant difference between the sadness- versus anger-inducing news groups (Mdiff = .243, SE = .240, p = .311). That is, an intensively emotional corporate message led those in the sadness-inducing news group to evaluate the corporate message as more credible (M = 4.27, SE = .172) than did those in the anger-inducing news group (M = 3.58, SE = .171), whereas there was no difference between the sadness- versus anger-inducing news groups in response to corporate message with no emotional appeals (see Figure 2). This tendency was found for other dependent variables, too. That is, in response to intensive emotional appeal messages, there were significant mean differences between the sadness- versus anger-inducing news groups in the corporate credibility perceptions (M = 4.10 vs. M = 3.44, Mdiff = .654, SE = .254, p = .011), blame attributions (M = 6.10 vs. M = 5.63, Mdiff = 417, SE = 205, p = .023), and behavioral intentions (M = 2.57 vs. M = 2,11, Mdiff = .462, SE = .215, p = .033). On the other hand, in response to no emotional appeal messages, there was no significant difference between the sadness- versus anger-inducing news groups for the dependent variables.
News frame and emotional appeal on corporate response credibility
Discussion
The current investigation revealed that different news frames affect people’s emotional responses to a given corporate crisis and that such emotions influence individuals’ depth of processing of the news and attitudes toward the responsible company. In addition, this study also posited that such emotions affect how individuals perceive the different types of response messages issued by the responsible company.
Specifically, this study found that the corporate message focusing on the relief and well-being of crisis victims tends to increase the publics’ corporate credibility perceptions as compared to the message focusing on the law, justice, and punishment. This was the case regardless of the initial news frames (i.e., anger vs. sadness). This result may seem not in accordance with our previous expectations of the congruence effect between discrete emotions and each emotion’s core coping themes (e.g., anger-punishment, sadness-relief). Rather, our findings suggest that when a corporate crisis involves human victims, publics might seek the information about the victims’ relief over the information about the company’s punishment even though the media have framed the crisis by emphasizing the company’s wrongdoing. Such rationale is in line with the recent work by Cho and Gower (2006), who found that the human interest frame in a corporate crisis message positively influenced participants’ emotional responses and the evaluation of the company. These findings shed light on the recent example of BP’s unsuccessful ad campaign in response to its oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. Although BP’s CEO apologized for the spill and claimed that “we will get this done; we will make this right” in the video ad, the ad campaign has been criticized for missing a concrete plan to help fishermen and small business owners who lost their jobs because of the spill (“BP Ads Backfire,” 2010). In fact, this example is also consistent with the SCCT literature (e.g., Coombs & Holladay, 2005), which argues that “expressing concern for victims (adjusting information) and reinforcing this compassion through compensation serve to blunt feelings of anger” (Coombs, 2007, p. 172). The present study provides empirical findings that confirm the literature as well as offering a practical implication that when a corporate crisis involves human victims, the responsible company might need to develop its response messages by maximizing the human interest frames and emphasizing how the victims’ situations have been relieved.
The current study also revealed how the rhetoric component (i.e., emotional appeals) in corporate response messages influenced the publics’ behavioral intentions. As expected based on the prior literature on cognitive/affective matching effects, the current study found that people tend to have more positive behavioral intentions when the corporate message contains intensive emotional appeals as compared to when the message contains no emotional appeals. It is assumed that this was due to the fact that the crisis had been emotionally framed by the news media, and the publics’ perceptions based on affects were more readily changed with emotional appeals. One limitation to the present study, however, was that it only compared anger- versus sadness-inducing news—without the news controlled for emotions. In the current investigation of the advantage of emotional appeals, therefore, this study was limited to conclude that the advantage was actually due to the cognitive/affective matching effects since it did not adopt a “cognitive” crisis scenario as a control condition. Future research should compare emotional crisis coverage and “cognitive” (or nonemotional) crisis coverage, and test to see if the emotional corporate response would be more effective only after the emotional news coverage was exposed.
Meanwhile, the advantage of emotional appeals was found contingent on how the crisis was previously framed by the media. People in the sadness-inducing news condition were more likely to have relatively higher credibility perceptions, lower blame attributions, and more favorable behavioral intentions in response to intensive emotional appeals as compared to those in the anger-inducing news condition. That is, an intensively emotional corporate message was more effective for those in the sadness-inducing news condition than for those in the anger-inducing news condition.
One possible explanation for this result was that the type of news frame had influenced participants’ attitudes toward the company (H2), and such prior attitudes might have affected their perceptions of the corporate messages. That is, individuals’ negative attitudes toward the company, previously formed by anger-inducing news, might lead them to be more skeptical about “emotional expressions” that the company delivered. This is in line with the principle of “meanings as integrating factors” that attribution theorists embrace (e.g., Heider, 1958). The principle states that individuals tend to attribute the motives of other’s actions in accordance with their previous perceptions about the party. The current study provided practical insights that when the publics were exposed to the anger-inducing news coverage of a corporate crisis, the company might want to use emotional appeals cautiously because they run the risk of a possible backlash concerning the publics’ attitude toward the company.
Implications
From a theoretical point of view, the current study validated and advanced the Appraisal Tendency Framework literature in the context of an organizational crisis. Specifically, this study proposed a theoretical framework of crisis information processing that examined two phases: (1) how the crisis news coverage could elicit differential emotions about the crisis from the publics and (2) how the organization could develop the optimal response strategies to meet the different emotional needs of the publics (see Figure 1). The results were found to fit in the proposed framework quite well. First, the findings at Phase I demonstrated that the distinct emotions (i.e., anger vs. sadness) induced by different news frames actually influenced individuals’ information processing (i.e., heuristic vs. systematic processing) and the evaluation of the company differently. This is in line with Jin’s (2009) finding that discrete emotions are inductable and distinguishable in crises, and “strategic publics can be segmented and identified not only by issues but also by their emotional engagement” (p. 312). The present study extended Jin’s (2009) findings by demonstrating the role of news media in inducing publics’ emotions in crises. In addition, at Phase II, this study also found that the different types of corporate messages (i.e., corporate response type, and the use of emotional appeals) would influence individuals’ credibility perceptions, blame attributions, and their attitudes toward and behavioral intentions about the company in crisis. The current findings at Phase II are consistent with many findings in the audience-oriented crisis communication literature (e.g., SCCT) that different crisis response strategies could influence audience’s perceptions, attributions, evaluations, and behavioral intentions. Notably, the current study expanded the boundary of SCCT a step further by empirically examining the effects of news media frames on publics’ initial crisis perceptions as well as the role of emotions in shaping the public’s subsequent responses. In sum, the current study empirically demonstrated a conceptual model of crisis information processing with a specific focus on the publics’ emotional responses. The results of this study suggest that the distinct emotions elicited by different news frames could influence the publics’ information processing and attitudes toward the organization, and that the organization could develop different response strategies by considering the publics’ emotional needs.
Also, with regard to our investigation about the use of emotional appeals, this study responded to Fediuk and his colleagues’ (2010) previous call for crisis response research to move forward by considering message characteristics as a component of the crisis response strategy. Researchers in crisis communication (e.g., Coombs, 2007; Fediuk et al., 2010, Jin, 2009) have called for more empirical research to examine how messages could be structured and framed to obtain more favorable responses from publics. Future research should investigate more various message factors, which could possibly affect the publics’ emotional response, blame attributions, evaluations, and even future behaviors regarding a given organizational crisis.
The current study also provided a few practical implications for practitioners who attempt to develop organizational messages in a crisis situation. For instance, if the media have framed an organizational crisis in a way that induced public sadness, practitioners might need to develop a corporate message that focuses on the relief and well-being of victims with intensive emotional appeals (H3a & RQ1). On the other hand, if the media frames the crisis in a way that induces public anger, practitioners might need to design a message that focuses on the well-being of victims and use emotional appeals sparingly (H3b & RQ1). It is noteworthy that practitioners’ use of emotional appeals may be limited by the media gatekeepers since organizations often rely on the interpretations of journalists, who may omit intensive emotional appeals. For instance, Holladay (2009) examined the media reports of chemical accident crises and found that company’s reputation repair strategies were actually included in only 24% of the media reports, whereas adjusting information was used in 60% of the reports. Practitioners who attempt to utilize intensive emotional appeals in response to an organizational crisis, therefore, may need to ensure that the news media recognize the organization’s emotional response itself as a newsworthy point. For instance, practitioners may need to couch the direct quotes of the CEO in intensive emotional appeals or use emotional language in the headlines and first paragraphs of the release. More importantly, the advances and the innovations in new technology have provided PR practitioners with direct access to key publics “that does not require the challenges of working with media gatekeepers” (p. 336, Wilcox & Cameron, 2009). A body of researchers in crisis communication also suggest the role of new communication technology in disseminating crisis responses to publics (Caldiero, Taylor, & Ungureanu, 2010; Coombs, 2007; Holladay, 2009). Toyota’s active involvement in social media after its massive recalls is a recent example demonstrating the increasing importance of new media as platforms for communicating directly with publics during a crisis (Bush, 2010). Notably, new media could also provide more effective communication platforms as compared to paid advertising in promoting the public’s credibility perceptions toward the organization. For instance, BP utilized 1-minute television commercials to directly address its oil spill crisis, but the ad campaign backfired, spurring criticism that the money for the ad campaign should have been spent on cleanup efforts and on compensating the victims of the spill. That is, corporate responses using paid advertising might cause the publics to doubt the company’s genuine motivation to care for the crisis and victims. Therefore, in an attempt to deliver corporate responses to a given crisis situation, practitioners may be able to utilize unpaid communication platforms such as corporate web sites, e-mail distributions, major blogs and chat forums, social-networking sites, or web casting to directly communicate with the key publics using effective rhetorical components such as emotional appeals.
Limitations and Future Study
There are a few limitations that need to be addressed regarding the present study. First, the manipulation check measure for emotional appeals could be improved in future work. Although this study did find a significant difference between the emotional appeal versus no emotional appeal groups, more comprehensive multiple-item measures will serve better to reflect this multidimensional construct. Second, it should also be acknowledged that this study employed only one corporate crisis type, limiting the generalizability of its findings. More products and organizational contexts involving many crisis types (e.g., human error accident, technical error recalls, workplace violence, etc.) should be further examined to extend our findings about crisis framing and appraisal to the diverse crisis contexts. Third, although participants’ emotions were measured at both Phase I and Phase II in the present study, this study used the emotion measures only to confirm the inducement of sadness versus anger. The possible emotions change between Phase I and Phased II caused by corporate responses was not examined due to the current scope of research. Future study may need to further investigate how publics’ emotions regarding a crisis could change depending on the corporate strategy and emotional appeals, using a two-phase experiment as in this study. Such an endeavor could develop a new indicator of successful crisis communication in terms of reducing negative discrete emotions. Fourth, due to experimental practicalities, the relations among dependent variables were not taken into account. It is also beyond the scope of this article to further discuss the causal/meditational relations among credibility perceptions, blame attributions, attitudes toward the company, and behavioral intentions. Nevertheless, such an endeavor should be undertaken to obtain a fuller understanding into the crisis response effects. In fact, the prior literature on SCCT has found that responsibility attributions affect other outcome variables such as affects, reputation, and behavioral intentions. It is noteworthy that the current study expanded the SCCT literature by including credibility perceptions as another key dependent variable. This is in line with Fediuk and his colleagues’ (2010) argument that credibility perceptions should be considered in crisis response research. Fediuk et al. (2010) claimed that, as with responsibility perceptions, “perceptions of honoring the account” should be treated as a factor to influence the relationship between an independent factor (i.e., crisis responses) and other outcome variables such as attitudes and behavioral intentions. Future research, therefore, should develop a clearer conceptual model to describe causal relations among the key outcome variables including credibility perceptions, by using meditational analysis or structural equation modeling.
Finally, this study used college students as participants in the experiment as a convenience sample based on the essential proposition that for basic human information processes the effects of independent variables are universal. According to Patzer (1996), college students are an acceptable convenience sample when findings serve as a foundation or pioneering effort to be tested with other types of participants, or when the research addresses fundamental questions such as cognitive information processing related to certain stimuli. The current study addresses a fundamental communication question, and our dependent variables (e.g., elaboration depth, emotional response, attitudes toward a company responsible for a cell phone battery explosion crisis) are likely to be universal factors that permit generalizations to the consumer population in general. In this sense, this study constitutes an important preliminary step in furthering fundamental knowledge of the role of emotions in public responses to an organizational crisis and providing a foundation to be tested with other types of publics in the future.
Taken together, this study contributes to the public relations body of knowledge by offering empirical support for the application of Appraisal Tendency Frameworks to the design and conduct of effective organizational communication. This study clearly demonstrates potential for developing effective corporate response strategies in a given crisis situation, for considering the type of crisis, how the crisis has been framed by the media, the publics’ emotional response, and the use of emotional appeals.
Footnotes
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the authorship and/or publication of this article.
The authors received no financial support for the research and/or authorship of this article.