How the events of service experiences stimulus consumers’ emotional elicitation and post-experience has become an important issue in marketing. Appraisal theory is the one that has been discussed from many scholars about this significant phenomenon since a long time; nevertheless, existing studies of appraisal theory have neglected expectedness and novelty appraisals on consumers, emotional elicitation and post-experience behavior in service experiences. This research aims to examine the influences of three appraisals-goal congruence, expectedness and novelty on consumers’ emotional elicitation and their satisfaction, WOM intentions and likelihood of generating WOM under service experience scenarios. This study contains two studies: study one examines main effects of goal congruence and expectedness on emotions and post-experience; study two tests the main effects of goal congruence and novelty on emotions. Experimental design is adopted in examining appraisals on emotions. Circumplex Model of Affect is adopted as the examination of emotions. The research hypotheses are tested using MANOVA as well as Regression analyses with experimental data from 320 university students in Taiwan. The research is the first in the literature on Appraisal Theory of emotional elicitation that both expectedness and novelty has main effects on emotional elicitation as well as consumer post-experience behavior. The higher expectedness one event is, the more positive emotions will be; vice versa. Also, the more novelty one event is, the more positive emotions will be; vice versa. Positive emotions have positive impact on consumer post-experience behavior; vice versa. Main effect of goal congruence on emotions shows significant in study one whereas in study two it shows no significant influence. The research is one of the few which investigate expectedness and novelty appraisals in appraisal theory that will cause emotional elicitation as well as consumer post-experience behavior.

• Yen-Tsung Huang(Tunghai University, Taiwan R.O.C.)
• Yi-Ju Su(Tunghai University, Taiwan R.O.C.)