Engagement in Emotional News on Social Media: Intensity and Type of Emotions

This study sheds new light on the relationship between emotion and engagement. Specifically, we investigate how the six discrete emotions that news visuals deliver, as well as the positiveness of news text, are associated with three engagement activities: sharing, commenting, and reacting. The findings show that users are less likely to share or comment on news posts that convey positive emotions, although they tend to react to such news frequently. The most prominent kind of emotion associated with user engagement activities was “sadness.” We analyzed 12,179 news stories posted on the four major U.S. newspapers’ Facebook pages.