Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages

The contemporary high-choice media landscape offers users considerable latitude to select media content. When it comes to media messaging about science issues like climate change, it is unclear whether audiences gravitate toward different kinds of emotionally evocative messages and what psychosocial factors underlie those preferences. Here, we presented young adults (N = 1,493) with three climate change videos to choose from (“funny,” “scary,” “informational”) and found more participants selected funny content than scary or informational. Contradicting hypotheses derived from mood management theory, negative mood was associated with selecting the scary video. Conservatives preferred the funny and scary video to the informational video, but gender identity was the strongest predictor of selective exposure with women preferring funny and scary videos to informational.

This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Environmental Communication on 2022-04-03, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/17524032.2022.2083207.

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Work Title Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Chris Skurka
  2. Rainer Romero-Canyas
  3. Helen H. Joo
  4. Jeff Niederdeppe
Keyword
  1. selective exposure
  2. emotional appeals
  3. climate change
  4. young adults
  5. mood management theory
License CC BY-NC 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial)
Work Type Article
Publisher
  1. Informa UK Limited
Publication Date April 3, 2022
Publisher Identifier (DOI)
  1. 10.1080/17524032.2022.2083207
Source
  1. Environmental Communication
Deposited August 30, 2022

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Version 1
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  • Created
  • Added Choose your own emotion_v12_authors-1.docx
  • Added Creator Chris Skurka
  • Added Creator Rainer Romero-Canyas
  • Added Creator Helen H. Joo
  • Added Creator Jeff Niederdeppe
  • Published
  • Updated Work Title, Keyword Show Changes
    Work Title
    • Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages
    • ! Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages
    Keyword
    • selective exposure, emotional appeals, climate change, young adults, mood management theory
  • Updated Work Title Show Changes
    Work Title
    • ! Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages
    • Choose Your Own Emotion: Predictors of Selective Exposure to Emotion-Inducing Climate Messages
  • Updated