Incidental emotions on the number of people front or rear effect in railway station

Different from past research on the number of people front or rear effect that has focused on cognitive factors, this article examines the impact of incidental emotions and cognitive appraisals associated with these emotions on the number of people front or rear effect in the railway station. Experiment 1 compare anger and sadness and demonstrated that the number of people front or rear effect influenced the evaluation of railway station´s service only in the angry (vs. sad) condition. Experiment 2 further identified the effects of agency control using a different emotion, frustration. Under human control, participants will evaluate the service of railway station more favorably when the number of people front is a few (vs. many) or the number of people rear is many (vs. a few). While under situation control, the number of people front or rear will not affect evaluation. These findings could be construed as documenting the moderating role of incidental emotions on the number of people front or rear effect.