How do emotions affect giving? Examining the effects of textual and facial emotions in charitable crowdfunding

Abstract Drawing on emotional contagion theory and language-mediated association theory, this study develops a research model to examine how textual and facial emotions affect charitable crowdfunding performance. We use computer-aided techniques to extract and measure specific textual and facial emotions in pitches. The proposed model is tested via regression analysis with a sample of 1372 campaigns collected from the largest charitable crowdfunding platform in China—Tencent Gongyi. Moreover, we conducted a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis to examine the complementarity of textual and facial emotions, which supplements the regression analysis results. Our findings show that both textual and facial emotions can impact funding outcomes. However, the effects of specific emotions vary: some (e.g., textual sadness and facial anger) are positive, some (e.g., textual anger and facial fear) are negative, and others (e.g., textual fear, textual disgust, and facial sadness) are insignificant. Moreover, facial emotions complement textual emotions in their effects on funding outcomes. This research outlines a framework to offer a more detailed and comprehensive understanding of emotions in charitable crowdfunding. It also contributes to existing research by revealing the vital but complex role of emotions in the persuasive process of prosocial behaviors and by uncovering the different cognitive mechanisms underlying the impacts of textual and facial emotions.