Marketers often employ a variety of positive emotions to encourage
consumption or promote a particular behavior (e.g., buying, donating,
recycling) to benefit an organization or cause. The authors show that
specific positive emotions do not universally increase prosocial behavior
but, rather, encourage different types of prosocial behavior. Four studies
show that whereas positive emotions (i.e., love, hope, pride, and
compassion) all induce prosocial behavior toward close entities (relative
to a neutral emotional state), only love induces prosocial behavior toward
distant others and international organizations. Love’s effect is driven by a
distinct form of broadening, characterized by extending feelings of social
connection and the boundary of caring to be more inclusive of others
regardless of relatedness. Love—as a trait and a momentary emotion—
is unique among positive emotions in fostering connectedness that other
positive emotions (hope and pride) do not and broadening behavior in a
way that other connected emotions (compassion) do not. This research
contributes to the broaden-and-build theory of positive emotion by
demonstrating a distinct type of broadening for love and adds an
important qualification to the general finding that positive emotions
uniformly encourage prosocial behavior.