Can Positive Emotions Promote Online Help?

Internet altruistic behavior is an active social behavior.As the development of the Internet,more and more researchers pay attention to the Internet altruistic behavior,and they focus on the psychological and behavioral problems of helping people in the network.Therefore,based on the previous research of this study,using the Internet as the main situation,we will explore how the emotional state of the helper and the related factors of the supplicant will influence the online helper behavior.In the first study,we want to explore whether the emotional state of the helper and help-seeking information expression can influence online helping behavior,and adopted 3*2 mixed experimental design,with affective priming(positive,negative,neutral),and help-seeking information expression(emotional,non-emotional)as the independent variable,with the willingness to give money and time as the dependent variable.The results of the study showed that compared with the subjects in the neutral emotional state,the participants in the positive emotional state were willing to spend less time and energy for helping others;the individuals faced with the emotional information would be better than the non-emotional,and they willing to pay more time and energy to help others.The second experiment,we explore the impact of emotional state of the helper and the expected reward on the Internet.We adopted 3*2 between-subjects experimental design,with affective priming(positive,negative,neutral)and the reward expectations(with or without)as the independent variables,with the willingness to give money and time as the dependent variable.The results of the study showed that the main effects of affective priming and the reward expectations were all not significant,but the interaction between the affective priming and the reward expectations was significant.In the positive emotional state,the subjects spent more energy in situations where there is no reward;in the negative emotional state,the subjects spent more time and energy in the absence of rewards;however,the difference is in the neutral emotional state,the subjects spent more effort on rewarding expectations.In summary,the first experiment found that under the network environment,when an individual is in an emotional state,they will focus more on their internalpsychological state,thereby reducing the helper behavior.In addition,the helpers face information that is full of emotions and sincere,will increase the level of trust in the content,and will also increase empathy for others,in the end the help behavior will also increase.The second experiment found that under positive and negative emotional states,subjects may maintain purely altruistic motives.Most of them are spontaneous pro-social behavior without expecting any return,and rewards may weaken their pure altruistic motivation and reduce their helper behaviors;in the neutral emotional state,rewards will motivate individuals to change their motives for helping others from internal motivation to external motivation,and they may shift from purely altruistic motivation to reciprocal altruistic motivation,thereby increasing their Internet helping behavior.