You Should Be Angry Too! The Role of Expressive Arousal in Response to Healthcare Consumer Reviews

Consumers expressing high arousal are challenging to manage; they are less responsive to problem solving and their high arousal state is often expressed in incivil tones. The current research contributes to service recovery as we investigate optimizing recovery strategies through a field and experimental study in healthcare. We test whether observers of online complaints prefer when respondents express high or low arousal. A field study examining the emotional content of consumer complaints on the National Health Service’s patient advice and liaison services portal indicates observers prefer high expressive arousal (results derived from text analyses using ANEW and SEANCE). We find differences between complainant and respondent emotionality such that complainants are more negative, express more arousal, and are less dominant than respondents. In a controlled experiment, we replicate the findings of the field study (preference for high expressive arousal responses), however, when complainants are rude/uncivilized in their complaint, observers experience psychological discomfort resulting in lower perceptions of interactional justice.