Schedule of Events | Symposia

Affective Framing of Information Influences Engagement, Donations, and Memory

Poster Session D - Monday, March 31, 2025, 8:00 – 10:00 am EDT, Back Bay Ballroom/Republic Ballroom

Alyssa Sinclair¹ (sinclair.allie@gmail.com), Danielle Cosme¹, José Carreras-Tartak¹, Emily Falk¹; ¹University of Pennsylvania

Negativity captures attention and motivates information seeking and sharing. However, negative messaging can also harm mental health and discourage sustained action to address crises like climate change. The imperative/interrogative theory of motivation proposes that emphasizing threat/urgency (imperative motivation) drives immediate goal-relevant behavior, but constrains attention and memory. In contrast, emphasizing reward/future goals (interrogative motivation) increases information seeking and detailed memory formation. To test these predictions, we adapted climate-related news headlines to feature different aspects of each story, emphasizing Crisis (disaster/urgency; imperative) or Action (progress toward future goals; interrogative). Across two experiments (N=687), we found that stronger positive and negative emotions were associated with intentions to read and share articles, and donations to related charities. Crisis and Action framing both increased reading and sharing intentions relative to the unaltered headlines (as originally published); the effects of framing were mediated by emotion strength. Consistent with theoretical predictions, Crisis framing had the strongest effects on immediate engagement (reading, sharing, and donating), but Action framing enhanced next-day memory for news content. Lastly, we computationally classified Action and Crisis framing in >25,000 climate-related news headlines on social media; the use of both framing strategies was associated with increased likes and reposts, relative to neutrally-framed headlines. Overall, we show that Action and Crisis framing can both increase information seeking and sharing, but have opposing effects on emotions and memory. Our findings are relevant to theories of motivated behavior, effects of neuromodulators on cognition, and mass communication related to important societal challenges like climate change.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions