Emotional Responses Shape the Substance of Information Seeking under Conditions of Threat

Abstract

Menacing news inclines individuals to acquire information, and research has explored how emotional reactions such as fear or anger condition this process. While scholars have debated the relevance of fear and anger for levels of attentiveness and learning in politics, fewer studies consider how variation in emotional responses can shape the substance of information searches in times of threat. We posit that heightened fear motivates interest in defense-oriented information among threatened individuals, while heightened anger motivates interest in aggression-oriented information. To test these hypotheses, we focus on international terrorist threat because of its known tendency to elevate both anger and fear. We use data that permit a behavioral measure of information seeking, via an experiment embedded within a Dynamic Process Tracing Environment (DPTE) platform. Within this information-rich context, exposure to terrorist threat motivates a search for relevant information. Furthermore, we find that while an induction to elevate anger prompts more immediate attention to aggression-oriented information, an induction to elevate fear is more effective in steering attention toward defense-oriented information.