Expressive aesthetics to ease perceived community support: Exploring personal innovativeness and routinised behaviour as moderators in Tuenti

摘要

The aim of this study is to investigate moderating effects of personal innovativeness and routinised behaviour on relationships between expressive aesthetics and perceived community support (PCS) in the domain of the social network site Tuenti. Our research, therefore, contributes to the existing literature by examining the heterogeneous influence of affective cues on the sense of belongingness to a community, and emotional benefits from intense bonds to close members.rnA structural equation modeling, specifically partial least square (PLS), is proposed to assess the relationships between the constructs together with the predictive power of the model analysed. In particular, the research model is validated empirically using data from a field survey of the most popular computer-mediated SNS among the Spanish college student population, Tuenti.rnThe results demonstrate that expressive aesthetics significantly predicts PCS. Likewise, the results provide strong support for the proposals that these effects (i.e., expressive aesthetics on PCS) will be moderated by personal innovativeness and routinised behaviour. The model and results can, consequently, be used to assess affective design aspects during the electronic interaction process.