Happy Faces Help Homes: The Role of Animal Facial Expressions in Charitable Advertising
研究了动物面部表情（快乐vs悲伤）如何影响收养意愿，发现快乐表情通过积极情感和认知推断提升自我利益预期，从而更有效促进收养，但悲伤表情在捐款情境中更有效。
Animal adoption campaigns increasingly rely on visual imagery to attract attention and motivate helping behavior, yet little is known about how animals’ emotional displays function as persuasive signals in advertising. Across five studies, this research examines how and why animals’ facial expressions shape adoption-related responses, and when these effects attenuate or reverse. Drawing on theories of self-focused decision-making, emotional contagion, and cognitive inference, we propose that adoption is a high-commitment helping context that tends to invite self-focused evaluation, thereby privileging emotional cues that forecast positive personal outcomes. Using archival data and controlled experiments, we demonstrate that animals displaying happy (vs. sad) facial expressions attract more click-through interest and elicit higher adoption intention. We further show that this effect is jointly driven by two parallel psychological processes: positive affective responses and favorable cognitive inferences, which together enhance anticipated self-benefit from adoption. Importantly, we identify two boundary conditions. Conceptually, experimentally shifting attention away from the self toward the animal weakens the happy-expression advantage. Practically, helping mode moderates the effect: happy expressions are more persuasive in adoption contexts, whereas sad expressions are more effective in motivating monetary donation. Together, these findings advance emotional persuasion theory and offer guidance for aligning emotional cues with the motivational structure of helping contexts.