Emotional Framing of News on Sexual Assault and Partisan User Engagement Behaviors

Based on the emotion-as-frames model and theories of political psychology, this study examines how the emotional frames (anger, anxiety, sexual) of news on sexual assault are associated with different news engagement behaviors in social media news pages with more conservative or liberal users. Results revealed that the approach or avoidance action tendencies of the emotional frames were associated with corresponding engagement behaviors. Anxiety was associated with less engagement, while sexual frames were associated with more engagement. The associations were stronger among news organizations with more conservative users and not significant among news organizations with more liberal users.