• 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.