When More Emotional Arousal Means Less Reading: The Case of Science News on Social Media

A common assumption in practice and research is that amplifying emotional arousal amplifies news reading. We challenge this assumption in the context of science news on social media. Drawing on the tripartite reactions to emotions (TRE) theory, we propose that expressed arousal in a news post influences reading intention through two competing pathways—affective and inferential—and that the relative effects of these pathways depend on the information gap between the news post on social media and the full article. Three controlled experiments provide converging evidence for most of our hypotheses. Our findings show that amplifying arousal does not necessarily amplify news reading. They also deepen understanding of how emotional expressions shape engagement with science news posts and offer an initial empirical test of TRE theory in a social media context.