Exploring the role of facial emotional expressions in charitable giving

Presenting pictures of people in need is perhaps one of the most widely used strategies that charities adopt to collect donations. Surprisingly, the literature is currently divided on what emotional expression works best: some suggest that victims in distress elicit empathy in donors and subsequent donations, while others argue that victims displaying happy faces boost giving by tuning the donors to positive emotions. Because of these puzzling results and the practical implications for charities, understanding when happy (or sad) emotional expressions elicit giving is important for both theoretical and practical reasons. First, the simple effect of facial expressions was tested, using a validated photo database, to control for the effect of potentially interfering factors, such as the colour and frame of the picture. Secondly, I tested whether presenting the beneficiary of help alone (separate evaluation: SE) or in a comparative context (joint evaluation: JE) could impact donation decisions, through the mediation of perceived efficacy. Finally, I expanded these results by recording fixation times during donation choices in a JE, through the use of an eye-tracker. I also considered the potential effect of experiential avoidance in guiding visual exploration and decisions in such a paradigm. Throughout the first two studies, I found that donations are higher for the happy child, compared to the neutral child, while there is no difference in donations to the neutral vs. sad children. JE, though, improves donations to the sad child, by increasing the perceived efficacy of donating to that child. Finally, the third study proved that fixation time predicts donation decisions, and adds on to the previous literature on efficacy in that looking longer at a sad child decreases the perceived efficacy of donations, confirming the hypothesis that the use of sad children can have a negative impact on donations by decreasing how effective the help is perceived as. Experiential avoidance, on the contrary, was not found to influence neither visual exploration of the two pictures, nor donation choices.