How emotions and issue controversy influence the diffusion of societal issues with imagined audience on Facebook

ABSTRACT

Message diffusion is associated with ‘going viral’ that many communicators strive for in spreading their words. The Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) provides a framework for the current study to understand the effects of emotions generated from a message on persuasion – how high- and low-effort processes of comprehending information influence people's decision in spreading societal issue-related Facebook posts. The researcher conducted a survey experiment to explore the effects of emotional response to societal issues on message diffusion. The findings suggest individuals’ diffusion decisions depend on issue controversy considering their imagined audience. Emotions trigger both cognitive and heuristic processing of information. The results reveal that message elaboration mediates the effects of both positive and negative emotion arousal on diffusing moderate-controversial issues to the more symmetrical audience. Positive and negative emotions were only directly associated with diffusion high-controversial issues to the symmetrical audience via Facebook. Theoretical contributions to ELM and practical implication of strategic communications were discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Message diffusion
• emotions
• Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM)
• societal issue
• Facebook

Acknowledgment

This work was supported by the Bowling Green State University's School of Media and Communication Excellence Award.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Bowling Green State University’s School of Media and Communication Excellence Award.