Positive Emotional Communication: A Tool for Rebuilding Public Trust in Crises

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_10How to use a DOI?

Keywords

emotional communication; crisis communication; public trust; social media; Twitter; COVID-19

Abstract

Crises are a recurrent feature of 21st-century governance, including economic, energy, climate, health, and armed-conflict emergencies. Governments must not only make decisions under uncertainty but also lead public narratives that guide behavior and sustain confidence. This study examines emotional communication during the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing the unmediated communication of the Government of Spain between 11 March and 27 December 2020. A quantitative content analysis was applied to 12,281 tweets from seven official accounts, with a custom GPT used as an auxiliary coder during the coding process. The results show sustained audience interest in official content and higher engagement with positively framed emotional messages, both in passive interaction (likes) and active interaction (retweets). However, inconsistent coordination across accounts, changing spokesperson roles, and declining production of crisis-specific content weakened narrative coherence. Because engagement is not a direct measure of trust, the findings identify communicative conditions that may support trust rather than demonstrating changes in trust itself.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Soledad García García
AU  - Raquel Rodríguez Díaz
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/10/16
TI  - Positive Emotional Communication: A Tool for Rebuilding Public Trust in Crises
BT  - Proceedings of the VI International Conference on Communication and Applied Technologies 2026 (ICOMTA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 92
EP  - 99
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_10
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-803-0_10
ID  - García2026
ER  -