Language Choice on Psychological Reactance in Instructor/Student Email Exchanges

The current study investigates sexual scripts in reality dating shows—in particular, how the gender of the communicator affects the choice of verbal and nonverbal immediacy behaviors aimed at making a first impression. Data were drawn from 331 couples of opposite-sex heterosexual strangers interacting for approximately 30 seconds on two reality dating shows: The Bachelor and The Bachelorette (2012–2019). As a result, a codebook of verbal immediacy cues ( N = 1623) and nonverbal immediacy cues ( N = 3021) was derived. The findings showed that verbal behavior encompassed 11 categories of verbal immediacy cues, while nonverbal behavior included 32 categories of nonverbal immediacy cues. Results also showed gender-related preferences for verbal immediacy behavior; for instance, men were more likely to outline the probability of relationship development and pay compliments; conversely, women were prone to intriguing men to arouse curiosity and interest. As for nonverbal immediacy behavior, men were predisposed to use clothes straightening, while women tended to communicate immediacy through head tilt, shoulder shrug, gaze down, gaze side(s), eyebrow flashes, hand-in-hand, hug, pat, holding hands in front of their bodies, and hair grooming. Nonetheless, the similarities between men and women were found to be greater than the differences. These findings could have wide-reaching implications for theorizing on social and cultural norms, gender stereotypes, and traditional gender roles in intimate relationships in the form of sexual scripts, along with contributing to the study of reality television.

Nowadays, numerous enterprises are actively adopting electronic performance monitoring (EPM) systems with the goal of enhancing organizational performance by stimulating employee proactive behavior. However, some companies have reported that the EPM system didn't achieve the expected results and even led to the opposite. To address this paradoxical phenomenon, we employed psychological reactance theory to investigate the impacts of employee differentiate perceptions of EPM (developmental EPM [DEPM] and preventive EPM [PEPM]) on individual psychological and behavior reactance. By conducting a three-wave survey questionnaire among 446 corporate employees, we find that DEPM facilitates proactive behavior, while PEPM inhibits such behaviors; Second, psychological reactance mediates the relationships among DEPM, PEPM, and proactive behavior; Third, individual trait mindfulness positively (negatively) moderates the impact of DEPM (PEPM) on psychological reactance. This research elucidates the effects of EPM on proactive behavior, providing valuable information to support attempts to refine digitally driven monitoring models within organizations.

The failure of realizing attitudinal or behavioral change by persuasive attempts is often attributed to bad message design, inappropriate use of communication strategies, or detrimental characteristics of the source. However, it has been acknowledged more and more that message receivers may also play an important role in accounting for the absence of attitudinal and behavioral change. Upon exposure to a persuasive message, people may experience psychological reactance because persuasive messages are perceived as a threat to freedom. This experience of psychological reactance often motivates people to adopt strategies that help them in resisting persuasion. Studying psychological reactance and strategies used to resist persuasive attempts is important in gaining a comprehensive understanding of persuasion processes. It may help explain, for example, why many health, marketing, and political campaigns fail to obtain the anticipated effects. This article provides an overview of theoretical and empirical literature regarding reactance and resistance toward persuasion. First, psychological reactance and resistance toward persuasion will be defined. Then, strategies that audiences adopt in resisting persuasion will be addressed, followed by techniques that may help audiences to resist persuasion. Moreover, related variables such as persuasion knowledge and skepticism will be discussed, and the article ends with a section on overcoming resistance by narrative persuasion.

This study investigates the influence of psychological and emotional elements on green purchase intentions. With the growing environmental concern in recent years, understanding these elements is essential for the development of effective green marketing campaigns. The research explores the relationship between key constructs such as green consumer values, psychological reactance, sense of belonging in a community, subjective well-being and scepticism towards advertising. By integrating and drawing on several theories such as Psychological Reactance Theory and Belongingness Theory, this study proposes a comprehensive conceptual framework. Results from a survey of 200 consumers demonstrate the complex relationships between these psychological and emotional variables and consumers’ intentions to purchase green products, emphasising the mediating effect of subjective well-being and the moderated mediating effect of scepticism towards advertising. These findings provide theoretical contributions to environmental psychology and green marketing and offer valuable insights and practical implications for marketers who aim to design effective green marketing strategies.

The current study advances the literature on psychological reactance theory by examining the moderating role of message elaboration on the reactance process. Participants (N = 512) were randomly assigned to a message condition (freedom-threatening vs. non-freedom-threatening language) in a between-subjects quasi-experimental design. Message elaboration was not manipulated but rather varied naturally. Two topics were examined (energy conservation and organ donation). Results demonstrated that freedom-threatening language was positively associated with perceived freedom threat for both topics. No interaction effect of message elaboration and freedom-threatening language on perceived freedom threat was observed for either topic. Findings are discussed in terms of the theoretical and practical contributions of the current study.

ABSTRACTThis study employed Brehm’s psychological reactance theory (PRT) to understand why students do or do not choose to follow classroom cell phone policies. Results (N = 750) from this study demonstrate that when instructors discourage cell phone use for noninstructional reasons, students feel their autonomy has been threatened. These perceptions of freedom threat ultimately induce a reactance process, leading sequentially to negative cognitions and anger, which predict policy noncompliance. This reactance process is also predictive of students’ enactment of other uncivil classroom behaviors (i.e., instructional dissent). Theoretical implications are discussed, and practical suggestions are given for instructors hoping to increase cell phone policy compliance and limit reactance among students in the classroom.

The resistance toward COVID-19 contact tracing apps: A study of psychological reactance among young adults in Italy

Male academic staff members received a Low‐ or High‐threat (freedom restricting) description of measures for the preferential treatment of women in job selection for academic staff functions. The High‐threat condition evoked more psychological reactance than the Low‐threat condition. Persons with high self‐esteem manifested a more negative attitude in the High‐threat than in the Low‐threat condition. Social position did not interact significantly with threat.

The rapid expansion of live commerce has been structurally dependent on high-arousal marketing stimuli—including artificial scarcity, digital countdown timers, and hyper-energetic host paralinguistics. While the prevailing academic literature employs the Stimulus-Organism-Response (SOR) paradigm to examine these tactics as drivers of short-term impulse purchasing, comparatively little attention has been paid to the long-term psychological consequences of sustained sensory pressure. This qualitative, descriptive phenomenological study explores the lived experience of live commerce burnout by integrating Psychological Reactance Theory (PRT) and the Persuasion Knowledge Model (PKM) as complementary analytical lenses. Through in-depth, semi-structured interviews with eighteen active digital consumers in Southeast Asia, the study mapped experiences of cognitive exhaustion and platform alienation. Inductive thematic analysis yielded three emergent themes: (1) sensory overload and host fatigue, (2) manufactured scarcity and trust erosion, and (3) the rebellion response. The findings suggest that high-arousal tactics may operate on an inverted U-curve relationship with sustainable consumer engagement—a theoretical proposition wherein stimuli that initially capture attention appear, beyond a cognitive tolerance threshold, to trigger PRT-consistent motivational states and PKM-activated persuasion coping responses. These contextually rich findings provide a foundation for future quantitative investigation and offer actionable guidance for practitioners seeking to architect more sustainable, low-arousal digital selling environments.

Psychological reactance theory suggests that the higher the threat-level of persuasive messages, the higher the reactance. Previous research has revealed ways to manipulate messages to either arouse or reduce psychological reactance. By contrast, the current work compares people’s reactance across different target actions while keeping the threat-level of the message consistent. We propose that reactance to a message depends on the target action’s pre-existing felt obligation. We demonstrate that low-obligation actions are more sensitive than high-obligation actions to the threat-level of a persuasive message. The current work provides one explanation for inconsistencies in the literature regarding message effects. This work also suggests that pre-existing obligation of a target action should be accounted for in order to successfully implement a message intervention.

The Paradox of Word-of-Mouth in Social Commerce: Exploring the Juxtaposed Impacts of Source Credibility and Information Quality on SWOM Spreading

Psychological reactance theory posits that when people are faced with threats to, or elimination of, behavioral freedom, they experience an aversive motivational state (i.e., psychological reactance). Recent research indicates that people’s state of mind affects reactance arousal processes. We hypothesized that being in a state of threatening uncertainty would cause people to experience less psychological reactance to a freedom-threatening communication than those in a state of certainty. We randomly assigned 114 students from a North American University to an uncertainty- or certainty-inducing recall task; they were then exposed to a reactance-arousing message. Compared to participants primed to feel certain, those primed with threatening uncertainty reported significantly less threat and more positive attitudes in response to a freedom threatening communication. Mediation analysis revealed an indirect effect of feelings of threatening uncertainty on people’s behavioral intentions, through perceptions of the controlling message. Results support our hypothesis: people in a state of uncertainty experience less psychological reactance than those in a state of certainty.

The present study aimed to explore the influence of donation amounts on donation decisions in different donation contexts and to reveal the psychological mechanisms. Furthermore, we focused on how to enhance individuals’ intention to donate voluntarily. We designed an experiment on donation decisions, employing event-related potentials (ERPs) to probe the effect of psychological mechanisms on donation decisions by detecting the neural basis of donation decision-making. Based on S-O-R (stimulus-organism-response) theory, we used donation contexts and donation amounts (stimuli) to induce psychological activity in the participants (organism) and then influence individual donation decision behaviors (response). Moreover, we applied psychological reactance (PR) theory to discuss the effect of donation context on decisions and the corresponding psychological process. The behavioral results showed that donation contexts (mandatory vs. voluntary) were significantly related to the donation amounts (i.e., less vs. more money that the charity received than money that the participants donated). At the ERP level, compared with mandatory donation, voluntary donation evoked a larger P2 amplitude when the charity received less money. In addition, a larger mean amplitude of LPP was elicited by voluntary donation compared to mandatory donation. This study provides practical implications for charity organizers to guide people to donate voluntarily.

This article deals with potential effects of incidental online exposure to political information (IOEP) on the German electorate during the 2017 national election campaign. We argue that the difference in currently unexpected and generally unwanted exposure to political online communication is crucial to the study of IOEP effects. While the former might result in “passive learning,” we hypothesize that–based on psychological reactance theory–the latter may be linked to defensive reactions with undesirable consequences among those who already are alienated from politics. Using cross-sectional data from an online survey among 1100 eligible voters, we can demonstrate that IOEP correlates with reactance in substantial segments. The study’s results are indicating, that the viral character of online campaigning may lead to the opposite of what was intended: voters are not only “trapped,” but might be repelled instead. Further empirical elaboration dealing with causal assumptions is encouraged.

Today, customers are intensively exposed to (digital) information, such as advertisements. However, many advertisements appear irrelevant for customers. But what would happen if advertisments could match the precise customer interests better, even over time? Using psychological reactance theory, we show that there is a high need for targeting customers along their current and future interests as precisely as possible to prevent consumer reactance such as advertising avoidance. A specific branch of research dealing with this topic is behavioral targeting and more specifically, predictive behavioral targeting (PBT) models. PBT models allow a more accurate prediction of interests to personalize advertising and generate clicks that push sales. However, many models assume temporally stable consumer interests without considering that interests vary over time. Hence, we develop a dynamic PBT model based on decision trees and neural networks that allows a temporal differentiation of of interests into short-, medium-, and long-term. Thereby, we introduce a transformation function based on a time series of interest rates that permits the model to switch between multiple behavioral targeting (BT) and PBT models depending on the type of interest. By underlining the effects of our model with the psychological reactance theory, we offer insights for research and practice.