Awesome, Awful: Emotional Flow in Environmental Messaging

ABSTRACT

Pro-environmental media content, such as nature documentary programming, often features awe-inducing scenes of Earth’s natural beauty, and exposure to this kind of content has been shown to increase persuasive outcomes. Yet environmental messaging is increasingly likely to portray the tragic impacts of human activities on these natural wonders alongside content about Earth’s beauty. How might emotional responses evolve during exposure to sequenced messages that juxtapose positively-valenced (beauty) and negatively-valenced (negative impacts) pro-environmental content? Embracing an emotional flow perspective as our overarching lens, we put forth two accounts for how emotions might shift during sequenced messaging: contrast effects and the elicitation of poignancy. We tested these accounts in a between-subjects experiment with U.S. adults (N = 979), following a 5 (focus: beauty-only, impacts-only, beauty→impacts, impacts→beauty, or control) × 2 (topic: coral reefs or forests) design. We found no evidence for contrast effects in discrete emotion intensity (awe, hope, sadness, or fear). The sequenced messages evoked greater poignancy than the static messages, which in turn predicted greater intentions to share the message. Although the sequenced messages indirectly predicted sharing intentions and policy support via several other emotion-based mechanisms, these outcomes did not differ between the static and sequenced conditions.

Disclosure statement

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

Data availability statement

All data, syntax, and materials are available through OSF at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/48DY7.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badges for Open Data, Open Materials and Preregistered. The data and materials are openly accessible at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/48DY7 and https://aspredicted.org/uu42w.pdf

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15213269.2023.2297965

Notes

1. Human influences on the environment can be positive or negative, but for the sake of simplicity, in the remainder of the paper we use “impacts” to mean negative impacts.

2. We also examined threat perceptions in response to our messages, but we have moved those (null) results to the Appendix due to space constraints.

3. We also performed several post hoc analyses that affirmed the validity of our poignancy scale, which can be found in the Appendix.