Two- or one-dimensional view of arousal? Exploring tense and energetic arousal routes to consumer attitudes

The purpose of this paper is to test whether separate tense and energetic forms of arousal impact consumer attitudes and provide a more complete understanding of the role of arousal in product evaluations. Past consumer research has treated arousal as a single dimension and found mixed results of the relation of arousal to consumer attitudes.

Study 1 was an online survey of consumers’ experiences with interactive products. The study tested whether the two hypothesized types of arousal were associated with different product features and related to attitudes in different (opposite) patterns. Study 2 was an experiment in which the type of arousal used to describe a vacation location was manipulated. The study tested the role of the two types of arousal in determining the effectiveness of the advertisements for people with different arousal-related orientations.

In Study 1, tense arousal mediated effects on the ergonomic qualities of the product on attitudes, whereas energetic arousal mediated effects on the hedonic qualities on attitudes. In Study 2, effects of advertisements were primarily driven by the tense arousal dimension for more telic-oriented (i.e. planning ahead) people and by the energetic arousal dimension for more paratelic-oriented (i.e. spontaneous) people. In both studies, treating arousal as a single dimension would have led to misleading conclusions.

This research demonstrates that separating arousal into a two- rather than one-dimensional construct can provide greater insights to the affective mechanisms underlying consumer attitudes.