Page 129 - JOURNAL OF LIBRARY SCIENCE IN CHINA 2015 Vol. 41

128 Journal of Library Science in China, Vol. 7, 2015

using micro-blogs. Then we continue to explore whether the affective experience has an
impact on the user satisfaction. If the answer is yes, how strong and in what direction is the
impact?

2 Hypotheses

In the field of marketing, affections are usually divided into positive affections and negative
affections, based on which the impacts of the two types of affections on user’s repeat purchase
behavior are studied (Geng, 2008; Yan, 2008; Y. X. Zhang, Ma, & R. P. Liu, 2010). Conventional
view holds that positive affections have a positive impact on consumer satisfaction, and negative
affections have a negative impact. Many studies have demonstrated that affections are an important
factor affecting consumer satisfaction (Oliver, 1989, 1993, 2010; Oliver & Rust, 1997; Westbrook
& Oliver, 1991). Oliver (1993) believes that the consumers’ positive affections and negative
affections have different impacts on consumer satisfaction; consumers with positive affective
experience have significantly higher satisfaction, and consumers with negative affective experience
have lower satisfaction. Later, through the study of consumers at playground and symphony
concerts, Oliver (1997) has found that both positive affections and confirmation of expectations
have a significantly positive impact on consumer satisfaction, with the impact of the former greater
than the impact of the latter (playground research path coefficient: 0.5 for positive affections and
0.36 for negative affections; symphony research path coefficient: 0.56 for positive affections
and 0.19 for negative affections). Bhattacherjee only considers the impact of confirmation of
expectations on user satisfaction of information system from the cognitive perspective, and does
not consider the factor of affections as Oliver does. Due to the similarity between consumer’s
repetitive purchase behavior and continued user behavior of information system (Bhattacherjee,
2001; Bhattacherjee et al., 2008), it is reasonable to assume that IS user affections are also an
important factor in affecting satisfaction.
Previous studies have focused more on the impact of IS user affections on the user behavior and
user intention (Beaudry & Pinsonneault, 2010; Jiang et al., 2010; Noteborn et al., 2012; Venkatesh,
2000). For example, Beaudry and Pinsonneault (2010) study the impact of positive affections
(happiness and excitement) and negative affections (anger and anxiety) on the IT use, and find that
positive affections have a positive impact on the IT use, and negative affections have a negative
impact on the IT use. But they did not directly answer the relationship between the two types of
affections and satisfaction. As user satisfaction is also an important factor affecting the IT use,
we believe that certain correlation should exist between the user affections and satisfaction. It is
reasonable to speculate that there is a positive correlation between positive affections of micro-
blog users and user satisfaction, and a negative correlation between negative affections and user
satisfaction. Namely:
Hypothesis 1 (H1): Micro-blog users’ positive affections have a significant positive impact on their