## 2 Literature Review and Theoretical Foundation
### Mediating Effect of Emotional Response
[109] suggest that more than 40% of user queries to chatbots on social media are emotional rather than informational, meaning users communicate their emotional state rather than a request or inquiry. Similarly, we can expect that in the case of interactions with chatbots asking for user information in an e-commerce context, emotional response also plays an important role. Indeed, even if users are not rationally able to appraise the risk involved in a situation, they can still experience subconscious activation of their nervous system--in other words, emotional response. The AIM predicts that thisactivation would in turn influence their behaviors. First, a high level of emotional response could occur as a physiological response to questions of varying levels of sensitivity. It is known that when facing a threat, humans' nervous system automatically activates [110]. As the privacy calculus presented above explains, being asked sensitive questions represents a risk for users [73]. Thus, an emotional response could be evoked in chatbot interactions when sensitive questions are asked. Emotional response is an automatic physiological reaction to events [110] and may act as a predictor to users' information disclosure. This is crucial in motivating certain natural behaviors, such as the fight-or-flight response, which occurs as a result of an event deemed threatening [110,111]. Therefore, higher activation of the nervous system could result in users feeling averse (flight) to what they perceive as a threat, in this case, disclosing their information to a chatbot. To assess the role of emotional response in the relation between question sensitivity and information disclosure, we posit that emotional response (measured here via arousal) mediates the relationship between question sensitivity and information disclosure such as:  
**H4a. **_Question sensitivity positively influences emotional response (arousal)_. **H4b. **_Emotional response (arousal) negatively influences disclosure._  
Second, emotional response could also explain how the information disclosure nudges evoke a reaction in users. Peripheral cues are said to serve an important role in consumer behaviors [112]. The sensitivity signal and social proof nudges used in this study are presented to give users cues on the level of sensitivity of each question and whether other users answer them. They could predict the activation of the nervous system of users as they represent a clear cause, with cognitive content, that could trigger an emotional response from users. For the sensitivity signal nudge, since it informs users on the categorization of the question asked, the resulting activation would be proportional to the level of sensitivity of the question. For the social proof nudge, the reaction would depend on the behavior of others, independently of the question sensitivity. Specifically, knowing that a minority of people answered a question would be perceived as a higher risk and the opposite would be observed for when a majority of people answered a question, regardless of the question's sensitivity. To assess the extent to which the presence of information disclosure nudges evokes emotional response (measured with arousal) among users, we posit that the relationship between question sensitivity signal and emotional response is moderated by sensitivity signal such that:  
**H5a. **_When a low sensitivity signal is present (vs. absent) for less sensitive questions, emotional response (arousal) decreases.H5b: When a high sensitivity signal is present (vs. absent) for more sensitive questions, emotional response (arousal) increases._  
We also posit that:  
**H6. **_Social proof moderates the relationship between question sensitivity and emotional response such as greater social proof leads to lower emotional response (arousal) and less social proof leads to higher emotional response (arousal)._  
To conclude, Figure 1 depicts the research model as a summary of the relationships proposed above.