Awesome, Awful: Emotional Flow in Environmental Messaging

Abstract

Pro-environmental media content, such as nature documentary programming, often features awe-inducing scenes of Earth’s natural beauty, and exposure to this kind of content has been shown to increase persuasive outcomes. Yet environmental messaging is increasingly likely to portray the tragic impacts of human activities on these natural wonders alongside content about Earth’s beauty. How might emotional responses evolve during exposure to sequenced messages that juxtapose positively-valenced (beauty) and negatively-valenced (negative impacts) pro-environmental content? Embracing an emotional flow perspective as our overarching lens, we put forth two accounts for how emotions might shift during sequenced messaging: contrast effects and the elicitation of poignancy. We tested these accounts in a between-subjects experiment with U.S. adults (N = 979), following a 5 (focus: beauty-only, impacts-only, beauty→impacts, impacts→beauty, or control) × 2 (topic: coral reefs or forests) design. We found no evidence for contrast effects in discrete emotion intensity (awe, hope, sadness, or fear). The sequenced messages evoked greater poignancy than the static messages, which in turn predicted greater intentions to share the message. Although the sequenced messages indirectly predicted sharing intentions and policy support via several other emotion-based mechanisms, these outcomes did not differ between the static and sequenced conditions.