Under the Drive of Anger Emotion: The Mechanism of News Communication and the Influence of Users’ Individual Characteristics on Communication Behavior

DOI

10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_81How to use a DOI?

Keywords

News; Social Media; News Interaction Behavior; User Personal Characteristics Adjustment; Anger Emotion

Abstract

In today’s era of deep penetration of social media, news dissemination shows a significant platform-based trend, and emotion has increasingly become a key element connecting news content and public interaction. Among them, “anger” is an intense emotional state. This article believes that it is often more easily absorbed, thereby greatly enhancing its communication effectiveness. This study adopts the controlled experiment method, randomly dividing 124 participants from more than 20 provinces and cities across the country into two groups: the control group receives neutral and objective texts, and the experimental group receives emotional texts embedded with anger. The two groups of texts have the same structure and word count. By measuring users’ interaction willingness and cognitive responses through questionnaires, the study explores readers’ reactions to the two groups of news. The research results show that anger significantly increases users’ willingness to engage in behaviors such as liking, commenting, and forwarding, and reduces users’ rational cognition of news details; when users’ positions are consistent with the news’ positions, they are more inclined to comment and forward; at the same time, the higher the users’ education level, the lower their perception of the credibility of news (especially angry news). This study fills the research gap in “specific emotions - user characteristics - communication behavior” and provides empirical references for journalists to balance emotional expression and objectivity, and for platforms to optimize algorithm recommendations.

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.

Download article (PDF)

TY  - CONF
AU  - Xiaoyu Hai
AU  - Zongyan Wen
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/05/15
TI  - Under the Drive of Anger Emotion: The Mechanism of News Communication and the Influence of Users’ Individual Characteristics on Communication Behavior
BT  - Proceedings of the 2026 5th International Conference on Social Sciences and Humanities and Arts (SSHA 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 796
EP  - 805
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_81
DO  - 10.2991/978-2-38476-577-5_81
ID  - Hai2026
ER  -