A Good Cry or Gratifying Revenge? The Effects of Culture and Mixed Emotions on Choice

ABSTRACT Content marketers often employ mixed emotional appeals to engage viewers. Prior research suggests mixed emotions would appeal to collectivists, but not individualists. In contrast, the current research proposes that both individualists and collectivists choose content (e.g., in movies and comics) intended to signal mixed emotions, if the mixed emotions align with their cultural values. Building on established theoretical links between collectivism and self‐transcendence values, and individualism and self‐enhancement values, the authors find that collectivists (individualists) process affection‐sadness (pride‐anger) more fluently, and that this relative fluency is consistent with their choices. Data from 8 years of box office revenue (2015‐2022) and six experiments (including three in the Web Appendix), along with an internal meta‐analysis, are consistent with the hypotheses. Practically, the findings suggest that content platforms can increase recommendation effectiveness by personalizing emotional tags and images to match viewers' cultural orientations. The authors discuss implications for content personalization, consumer experience, and recommendation effectiveness.