In a traditional classroom environment, instructor enthusiasm has been shown to enhance student's emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. Additionally, emotional response theory argues that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of an instructor will induce positive emotional states in learners, which in turn, enact learners' approach behaviours in the learning process. Therefore, should a pedagogical agent convey enthusiastic behaviours in a multimedia learning environment? Literature and theoretical reviews offer two competing views. The first view, based on emotional response theory, predicts that enthusiastic verbal and nonverbal cues of a pedagogical agent can induce higher positive emotions in learners, which in turn, enhance affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. However, the second view, based on cognitive load theory, suggests that pedagogical agent enthusiasm may increase extraneous cognitive load (additional processing in the mind), which negatively impact emotion, affective perceptions, intrinsic motivation, and cognitive outcome. To investigate the effects of agent enthusiasm, seventy-two university freshmen interacted with either an enthusiastic agent or a neutral agent (operationalized through vocal tones, facial expression, gestures, and remarks) that simulates the instructional role of a virtual tutor that delivers narrative demonstrations on how to predict the outputs of C-Programming algorithms. The results of our study showed that pedagogical agent enthusiasm significantly enhanced emotion, intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions, and cognitive outcome. Moreover, mediation analyses revealed that the facilitating effects of agent enthusiasm on intrinsic motivation, affective perceptions of the learning environment, and affective perceptions of the pedagogical agent were fully mediated by a learner's positive emotion, thus demonstrating that the framework of emotional response theory can be applied to learneragent interaction in a multimedia learning environment. Implications and suggestions for future research related to pedagogical agent enthusiasm are discussed in this paper.

While prior research has examined the effects of interactive e-commerce avatars that simulate the roles of virtual assistants and recommender agents, there is lack of empirical study that investigates the effects of non-interactive talking avatars in e-commerce. This is unfortunate, as many websites today utilize non-interactive talking avatars that provide one-way dialogue in the forms of greetings, introduction of the company, and description of products and services offered. To bridge this gap, our study aims to investigate the effects of non-interactive talking avatar on perceptions of social presence, credibility, website trust, and patronage intention in an online store. Comparing between the experimental (website with avatar) and control (website without avatar) conditions, the experimental results showed that perceived social presence was significantly enhanced by the presence of the non-interactive talking avatar. Furthermore, the presence of the avatar had positive effects on website trust and patronage intention among male participants; but had negative effects on perceptions of information credibility and website patronage intention among females. Analysis based on participants’ comments suggests that females were more critical towards certain shortcomings of the non-interactive talking avatar; citing limited interactivity and artificial dialogue from text-to-speech engine. Additionally, the comment analysis suggests that females preferred processing textual over auditory information (as spoken by the avatar) about the products in the online store. Theoretical and managerial implications related to non-interactive talking avatars are discussed in this paper.

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This study investigates the factors influencing Generation Y and Z’s satisfaction and perceived enjoyment of using E-wallet. This paper further assesses whether consumers perceived enjoyment and satisfaction with using E-wallet would significantly affect their impulsive buying behavior. PLS-SEM was conducted based on 201 valid responses from active E-wallet users collected through an online survey. The results revealed that perceived interactivity and subjective norm positively influenced perceived enjoyment and satisfaction with using E-wallet, respectively. Perceived risk had no significant impact on perceived enjoyment and satisfaction with E-wallet, whereas visual appeal positively influenced perceived enjoyment but not satisfaction. Moreover, this study found that perceived enjoyment of using an E-wallet positively affected impulse buying while satisfaction with E-wallet had no significant relationship with impulse buying. Implications and recommendations for future research are discussed in this paper.

Purpose This study aims to examine the effects of voice enthusiasm (enthusiastic voice vs calm voice) on social ratings of the speaker, cognitive load and transfer performance in multimedia learning. Design/methodology/approach Two laboratory experiments were conducted in which learners learned from a multimedia presentation about computer algorithm that was narrated by either an enthusiastic human voice or a calm human voice. Findings Results from Experiment 1 revealed that the enthusiastic voice narration led to higher social ratings of the speaker and transfer performance when compared to the calm voice narration. Experiment 2 demonstrated that the enthusiastic voice led to higher affective social ratings (human-like and engaging) and transfer performance as compared to the calm voice. Moreover, it was shown that a calm voice prompted a higher germane load than an enthusiastic voice, which conforms to the argument that prosodic cues in voice can influence processing in multimedia learning among non-native speakers. Originality/value This study extends from prior studies that examined voice effects related to mechanization, accent, dialect, and slang in multimedia learning to examining the effects of voice enthusiasm in multimedia learning.