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User-generated content (UGC), such as reviews on e-commerce sites (Cheng & Yang, 2022; Pham et al., 2023) and answers on Q&A sites (Jin et al., 2016; Zhang et al., 2020), constitutes a critical component of online communities. To locate and highlight helpful UGC and reduce confusion, many communities have established helpfulness-assessment systems. A large number of studies have been dedicated to understanding what constitutes perceived UGC helpfulness. For online reviews, prior research has indicated that factors influencing review helpfulness primarily include content characteristics such as review length, expressed emotion, and readability (Mudambi & Schuff, 2010; Eslami et al., 2018; Filieri et al., 2018). Additionally, scholars have also given attention to the specific characteristics of the reviewer, including anonymity and reputation (Cheung et al., 2012; Hama et al., 2019).
In recent years, owing to the development of online Q&A communities, scholars have intensified their examination of the perceived helpfulness of answers. Some studies have examined replier characteristics, including reputation score (Chen et al., 2010), expertise (Edwards, 2008), and experience (Shah & Pomerantz, 2010). Additionally, question-level factors such as question length (Shah & Pomerantz, 2010), attribute category (Harper et al., 2008), and reward size (Jeon et al., 2010) have also been examined to determine how they affect the perceived helpfulness of answers. Subsequently, a greater portion of the literature has concentrated on the characteristics of answer content. For example, answer content characteristics, such as answer length (Silberg et al., 1997; Liu et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020), politeness (Lee et al., 2019), metaphor (Zhang et al., 2019), and readability (Liu et al., 2020), have been subject to examination. Table 8 in the Appendix summarizes the examined influence factors of the perceived value of answers in online Q&A communities.
Although emotion, as a significant component of answer content characteristics, has been extensively researched in the context of answer helpfulness (especially health-related answer helpfulness), researchers’ findings were mixed (Jin et al., 2016; Yin et al., 2017; Li & Huang, 2020; Liu et al., 2020; Zhang et al., 2020). On the one hand, Jin et al. (2016) showed that higher emotional intensity can provide more emotional support for readers, thereby potentially increasing the perceived helpfulness of the health-related answer. In addition, emotional expression can increase the perceived helpfulness by facilitating readers’ information processing (Li & Huang, 2020). On the other hand, the literature also indicates that emotional content could detract from the objectivity and perceived expertise of health-related answers (Zhang et al., 2020). These inconsistent findings suggest that emotional content may influence the reader’s perception of answer helpfulness in a more sophisticated manner. Certain prior studies have adopted a reductive approach by assuming that the relationship between emotional content and perceived value is linear. However, as suggested by Yin et al. (2017), content with low and high emotional intensity may elicit divergent perceptions among readers, potentially giving rise to an inverted U-shaped relationship rather than a linear one. To elucidate the aforementioned inconsistent findings, our study will investigate the potential for an inverted U-shaped relationship between emotional content and answer helpfulness within online health Q&A communities.