• Science of Emotion and Sensibility
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• v.18 no.3
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• pp.49-62
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• 2015

This study investigates the interactive effects of guilt appeal level and empathic disposition (personal distress/empathic concern) on responses over the international relief messages. Guilt appeal level refers to the high or low degree of a message eliciting guilty feeling from the recipient. Empathic disposition is defined as personal tendency to assimilate and concern about the experience of others and we used two sub-dimensions, empathic concern and personal distress. The experiment was composed of two steps. At the first step, the participants rated the personal disposition measures and at the second step, they were shown one of the relief messages with different guilt level. Thus, the whole experiment was guilt appeal level ${\times}$ personal traits factorial design on guilty feeling, attitudes and behavioral intention. The results showed that guilt appeal level interacted with the personal distress disposition on the responses. The interaction was induced mainly from the differences of personal distress in the condition of high guilt appeal. High empathic concern individuals showed more favorable attitudes and behavioral intention regardless of the appeal conditions compared to low empathic concern individuals.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.19 no.9
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• pp.501-511
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• 2019

Messages to help people far away, such as International relief campaign, are heavily influenced by situational factors. In this light, the study examined whether the message characteristics (gain/loss framing) and the individual characteristics (previous attitude to helping activity) interact to affect the message attitude and behavioral intention. The study was conducted by an experiment involving 220 subjects. The analysis resulted in the significant interactions between gain/loss framing and pre-attitude by the same direction for message attitudes and behavioral intention. It was shown that gain framing worked more effectively for the relatively more friendly group towards helping activities than for the less friendly one. The same direction was shown in the loss framing, but its difference was smaller. The process of the interactions appeared as mediated by anticipated satisfaction. The practical and theoretical implications were discussed for proper planning of messages to help others.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.17 no.7
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• pp.332-343
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• 2017

This study examined the impact of interaction between dispositional empathic concern (DEC) and message framing on effects of the international aid campaign. DEC refers to a trait with which people tend to sympathize with and be concerned about others in need. Message framing is differentiated by positive or negative type. The results supported the prediction that the interaction between DEC and framing would have an effect on responses to messages advocating international relief activities. The overall findings show that the interaction was mainly the result of positive framing eliciting more favorable responses (behavioral intention and perceived relationship closeness) from higher DEC individuals than lower ones. The interaction effect on behavioral interaction was mediated by perceived relationship closeness.