Nation Equity: Incidental Emotions in Country-of-Origin Effects

Abstract

Different from past research on country-of-origin effects that has focused on cognitive factors, this article examines the impact of incidental emotions and cognitive appraisals associated with these emotions on country-of-origin effects. Experiment 1 compared anger and sadness and demonstrated that country of origin influenced evaluations only in the angry (vs. sad) condition where human (vs. situation) control was high. Experiment 2 further identified the effects of agency control using a different emotion, frustration. Based on these observations, this article suggests that, like brands, countries also have equity associated with them, termed "nation equity," that has both performance and emotional components. (c) 2006 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..