Gender Differences in Responding to Sad Emotional Appeal: A Moderated Mediation Explanation

An experiment was conducted to investigate gender differences in response to public service advertising with sad emotional appeal vs. rational appeal. Results showed that females showed more favorable attitude towards helping when exposed to the sad emotional appeal ad than the rational appeal ad. However, males showed no significant differences in attitude to helping in the two conditions. Such gender differences in effectiveness of sad emotional appeal were found to be mediated by ad evoked empathic emotions.