Crisis factors, emotions, and perceived informational channel significance during emergencies

ABSTRACT

Individuals’ information seeking and the role of emotions are important to crisis communication research. A survey was conducted (N = 1100) to examine the chain effects of crisis factors on college young adults’ discrete emotions and perceived channel significance. Key findings suggest that crisis factors affect channel significance both directly and indirectly. Crisis factors overall elicit more fear and anxiety (attribution-independent emotions) than anger and sympathy (attribution-dependent emotions). Uncertainty does not affect perceived channel significance, while urgency prompts individuals to seek out non-traditional media and severity affects information seeking on all channels. Attribution-independent emotions such as fear and sadness have positive mediating effects, and attribution-dependent emotions such as anger and sympathy have negative mediating effects. Finally, media richness per se may not be a prominent concern during emergencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Crisis communication
• emotions
• information channels
• severity
• urgency
• uncertainty

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 The authors also conducted multigroup SEM that modeled path coefficients for each crisis scenario, and found no significant departure from the results based on pooled analysis.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sifan Xu

Sifan Xu (Ph.D., University of Maryland College Park) is an assistant professor in the Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations at the University of Tennessee Knoxville, USA. His main research interests include interorganizational and organization–publics relationships, crisis communication, and social identity.

Cen Yue

Cen (April) Yue (Ph.D., University of Florida) is an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Connecticut. Her research interests focus on internal public relations, leadership communication, organizational change management, and relationship management.