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Affective Framing of Information Influences Engagement, Donations, and Memory

Poster Session C - Sunday, March 8, 2026, 5:00 – 7:00 pm PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Alyssa Sinclair¹ (), Danielle Cosme¹, José Carreras-Tartak¹, Omaya Torres-Grillo¹, Benjamin Muzekari¹, Christian Benitez¹, Emily Falk¹; ¹University of Pennsylvania

Negativity captures attention and motivates information seeking and sharing. However, negative messaging can harm mental health and potentially discourage action to address long-term challenges. The neural context model of motivation proposes that threat or urgency (imperative motivation, noradrenergic modulation) drives immediate goal-directed behavior, but narrows attention and memory. In contrast, rewards or future-oriented goals (interrogative motivation, dopaminergic modulation) motivate exploratory information seeking and enrich memory formation. To test these predictions, we adapted news article excerpts to emphasize Crisis (urgent threats; imperative) or Opportunity (future rewards; interrogative). Across two experiments, we found that positive and negative affect were both associated with greater reading and sharing intentions, and real charitable donations. Crisis and Opportunity framing both motivated reading and sharing relative to Control framing (unaltered headlines); framing effects were mediated by affect. However, we observed a trade-off whereby Crisis framing had the strongest effects on immediate engagement (reading, sharing, and donating), but Opportunity framing enhanced next-day memory for news content. In an ongoing fMRI study, we are investigating how news framing modulates activation in noradrenergic and dopaminergic systems, and using representational similarity analyses to examine neural representations of naturalistic news stimuli across dimensions (e.g., valence, arousal, self-relevance, semantic similarity). Neural results will be presented in addition to existing behavioral evidence. Overall, we show that Crisis and Opportunity framing both motivate information seeking and sharing, but have opposing effects on affect and memory. Our findings advance theories of motivated cognition and apply insights to real-world information consumption related to climate change and health.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Emotion-cognition interactions