Surprised–Curious–Confused, Empathetic, and Entertained? The Role of Epistemic Emotions and Empathy in Eudaimonic Entertainment Experiences and Political News Processing

ABSTRACT

Based on the dual-process model of entertainment experiences and motivated cognition, we propose that specific affective states such as surprise, curiosity, and confusion (so-called epistemic emotions), as well as empathy, are involved in eudaimonic entertainment experiences while reading political news. We further assume that these emotions are related to normatively desirable outcomes such as deliberation within, information seeking, and knowledge acquisition about political topics. To test the hypothesized model, we conducted a between-subjects online experiment (N = 407) that used different stimuli to induce the emotions of interest while simultaneously varying news topics. Structural equation modeling revealed that the data mostly supported our hypotheses. Overall, we find that through these affective states, even soft news can enable normatively desirable outcomes. All data and materials can be accessed from https://osf.io/82gqu/.

Acknowledgment

The present study was conducted as part of a Master’s project at the University of Mannheim. The authors would like to thank Janine Gress and Victoria Romanin for their contribution to this study.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study as well as all materials are openly available at the OSF: https://osf.io/82gqu/.

Open scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data and Open Materials through Open Practices Disclosure. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/82gqu/.

Notes

1. To address the concerns of a reviewer about whether this analysis decision had an impact on our results, we conducted an additional exploratory model, which we report in the supplementary analysis file (“analyses.html”) on OSF. This model is calculated without joining control and empathy groups (basically, this is the model we would have calculated had our empathy manipulation been successful). All effects that we report in the results remain significant and similar in size in this model.