Hardening My Heart: Persuasion Knowledge and Emotion Regulation

Consumers do not passively process marketing influence attempts, but rather use persuasion schemas to interpret, resist, and reject persuasion (Campbell and Kirmani 2000; Friestad and Wright 1994). The “Persuasion Knowledge Model” (PKM) proposes that consumers develop knowledge structures about persuasion, influence agents, and selling tactics, and they use this knowledge to cope with persuasion episodes. Researchers propose an assortment of persuasion tactics; invoking social norms, “buttering up” the target, bargaining, and more (Friestad and Wright 1994; Rule, Bisanz, and Kohn 1985). While many of these have been investigated, a repeatedly mentioned but rarely examined tactic is emotions. In fact, using emotional appeals was one of the most common interpersonal persuasion techniques (Rule, Bisanz, and Kohn 1985). Given this, understanding whether consumers recognize emotional appeals as persuasive tactics and how they respond to these attempts is needed. We specifically focus upon emotion appeals that use sadness to motivate consumers. Sadness results from experiences of loss that cannot be avoided (Frijda 1986), and prompts actions to change the situation (Frijda, Kuipers, and ter Schure 1989). Expressions of sadness indicate a need for help (Izard 1977) and promote feelings of sympathy (Small and Verrochi 2009), leading to enhanced prosocial behaviors (Small and Verrochi 2009). We draw upon emotion regulation theories—how individuals manage the emotion antecedents and emotional responses (Gross 1998)—to propose that when consumers recognize an emotional appeal as an influence attempt, they regulate their emotions to resist persuasion.