Morally driven and emotionally fueled: the interactive effects of values and emotions in the social transmission of information endorsing e-cigarettes
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Date
2023-01-01
DOI
Authors
Wu, Jiaxi
Wang, Yunwen
Xu, Yusi Aveva
Fetterman, Jessica
Hong, Traci
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Citation
J. Wu, Y. Wang, Y.A. Xu, J. Fetterman, T. Hong. 2023. "Morally driven and emotionally fueled: The interactive effects of values and emotions in the social transmission of information endorsing e-cigarettes" International Journal of Communication, Volume 17, pp.1190-1210.
Abstract
Drawing upon the literature on moral foundations theory and the social transmission of information, our study investigated the effects of values and emotions on the sharing of pro-vaping messages on Twitter. Tweets (N = 9,542) containing top pro-vaping hashtags during the time of e-cigarette or vaping use–associated lung injury (EVALI) and the federal vape bans were analyzed. A lexicon-based machine classifier customized to vaping discourse and the NRC Word-Emotion Association Lexicon were used to produce the frequencies of moral and emotional words in the corpus. Mixed-effects hurdle negative binomial models were performed to predict the likelihood of a post receiving one and more retweets. Results showed that moral foundations, particularly Authority/subversion and Care/harm, and emotions of anger and sadness predicted the sharing of pro-vaping tweets. Interaction effects indicated that both emotions had a stronger effect on eliciting shares when a post contained lower levels of moral foundations. This study provides insights into the mechanism of how pro-vaping messages are amplified on Twitter, emphasizing the roles of moral values and emotions in enabling the process.
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Copyright © 2023 (Jiaxi Wu, Yunwen Wang, Yusi Aveva Xu, Jessica L. Fetterman, and Traci Hong). This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 4.0 International.