The Immediate and Delayed Beliefs in Headlines With High-arousal Sentence Starters

Abstract

Emotionally charged messages can distort truth perception, and recent research highlights the impact of emotional language on news beliefs. While past studies have focused on emotional valence, the role of emotional arousal in shaping beliefs remains underexplored, particularly regarding its long-term effects. This research investigates both immediate and delayed beliefs in response to headlines with high-arousal sentence starters (HASS), such as “Shocking!.” Across five longitudinal experiments (N _immediate = 1,329; N _delayed = 687), including two preregistered studies and a mini meta-analysis, we found that HASS initially suppresses belief. However, this effect diminishes over time, leading to a rebound in belief. These findings underscore the importance of emotional language in truth perception and suggest that practitioners should exercise caution when employing HASS in communication strategies.

Keywords

high-arousal sentence starters immediate belief delayed belief sleeper effect

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

Al-Rawi

(2019). Viral news on social media. Digital Journalism, 7(1), 63–79.

Bago

Rosenzweig

L. R.

Berinsky

A. J.

Rand

D. G.

(2022). Emotion may predict susceptibility to fake news but emotion regulation does not seem to help. Cognition and Emotion, 36(6), 1166–1180.

Berger

Milkman

K. L.

(2012). What makes online content viral? Journal of Marketing Research, 49(2), 192–205.

Brady

W. J.

Wills

J. A.

Jost

J. T.

Tucker

J. A.

Van Bavel

J. J.

(2017). Emotion shapes the diffusion of moralized content in social networks. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 114(28), 7313–7318.

Brashier

N. M.

Marsh

E. J.

(2020). Judging truth. Annual Review of Psychology, 71, 499–515.

Brashier

N. M.

Pennycook

Berinsky

A. J.

Rand

D. G

. (2021). Timing matters when correcting fake news. PNAS Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 118(5), 1–3.

Chakraborty

Sarkar

Mrigen

Ganguly

(2017). Tabloids in the era of social media? Understanding the production and consumption of clickbaits in Twitter. Proc. ACM Hum.-Comput. Interact., 1(CSCW), Article 30. https://doi.org/10.1145/3134665

Chen

Chaiken

(1999). The heuristic-systematic model in its broader context. In Chaiken

Trope

(Eds.), Dual-process theories in social psychology (pp. 73–96). The Guilford Press.

Cohen

(2013). Statistical power analysis for the behavioral sciences. Routledge.

10.

Dong

Tao

Xia

Jiang

Liu

(2020). Public emotions and rumors spread during the COVID-19 epidemic in China: Web-based correlation study. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 22(11), e21933.

11.

Faul

Erdfelder

Lang

A.-G.

Buchner

(2007). G* Power 3: A flexible statistical power analysis program for the social, behavioral, and biomedical sciences. Behavior Research Methods, 39(2), 175–191.

12.

Forgas

J. P.

(2019). Happy believers and sad skeptics? Affective influences on gullibility. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 28(3), 306–313.

13.

Goh

J. X.

Hall

J. A.

Rosenthal

(2016). Mini meta-analysis of your own studies: Some arguments on why and a primer on how. Social and Personality Psychology Compass, 10(10), 535–549.

14.

Grady

R. H.

Ditto

P. H.

Loftus

E. F.

(2021). Nevertheless, partisanship persisted: Fake news warnings help briefly, but bias returns with time. Cogn Res Princ Implic, 6(1), 52.

15.

Grant

Hsu

(2022). Google finds ‘inoculating’ people against misinformation helps blunt its power. The New York Times.

16.

Haist

Shimamura

A. P.

Squire

L. R.

(1992). On the relationship between recall and recognition memory. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 18(4), 691–702.

17.

Heinbach

Ziegele

Quiring

(2018). Sleeper effect from below: Long-term effects of source credibility and user comments on the persuasiveness of news articles. New Media & Society, 20(12), 4765–4786.

18.

Hovland

C. I.

Lumsdaine

A. A.

Sheffield

F. D.

(1949). Experiments on mass communication, Vol. 3 [doi:10.1037/14519-000]. Princeton University Press.

19.

Hovland

C.I.

Janis

I.L.

Kelley

H.H.

(1953). Communication and persuasion. Yale University Press.

20.

Hovland

C. I.

Weiss

(1951). The influence of source credibility on communication effectiveness. Public Opinion Quarterly, 15, 635–650. https://doi.org/10.1086/266350

21.

Huntsinger

J. R.

(2013). Incidental experiences of affective coherence and incoherence influence persuasion. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 39(6), 792–802.

22.

Hurst

(2016). To clickbait or not to clickbait? An examination of clickbait headline effects on source credibility [Master thesis, University of Missouri-Columbia].

23.

Kelman

H. C.

Hovland

C. I.

(1953). “Reinstatement” of the communicator in delayed measurement of opinion change. The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, 48(3), 327–335.

24.

Kirsten

Seib-Pfeifer

L. E.

Gibbons

(2022). Helpless against food cues: the influence of pro- and anti-sugar videos on instrumental food-seeking behaviour in a Pavlovian-to-instrumental transfer paradigm. Psychology & Health, 37(5), 633–657.

25.

Kitchen

P. J.

Kerr

Schultz

D. E.

McColl

Pals

(2014). The elaboration likelihood model: Review, critique and research agenda. European Journal of Marketing, 48(11–12), 2033–2050. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJM-12-2011-0776

26.

Kumkale

G. T.

Albarracín

(2004). The sleeper effect in Persuasion: A meta-analytic review. Psychological Bulletin, 130(1), 143–172. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.130.1.143

27.

Lammers

Pauels

Fleischmann

Galinsky

A. D.

(2022). Why people hate congress but love their own congressperson: An information processing explanation. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 48(3), 412–425.

28.

Lanciano

Curci

Semin

G. R.

(2010). The emotional and reconstructive determinants of emotional memories: An experimental approach to flashbulb memory investigation. Memory, 18(5), 473–485.

29.

Lariscy

R. A. W.

Tinkham

S. F.

(1999). The sleeper effect and negative political advertising. Journal of Advertising, 28(4), 13–30.

30.

Levine

T. R.

(2014). Truth-default theory (TDT) a theory of human deception and deception detection. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33(4), 378–392.

31.

(2019). Clickbait and emotional language in fake news. Department of Computer Science. The University of Texas at Austin. EE. UU.

32.

Martel

Pennycook

Rand

D. G.

(2020). Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(1), 47.

33.

McCornack

S. A.

(1992). Information manipulation theory. Communications Monographs, 59(1), 1–16.

34.

McCornack

S. A.

Morrison

Paik

J. E.

Wisner

A. M.

Zhu

(2014). Information manipulation theory 2: A propositional theory of deceptive discourse production. Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 33(4), 348–377.

35.

Molyneux

Coddington

(2020). Aggregation, clickbait and their effect on perceptions of journalistic credibility and quality. Journalism Practice, 14(4), 429–446.

36.

Morris

J. D.

Woo

Singh

(2005). Elaboration likelihood model: A missing intrinsic emotional implication. Journal of Targeting, Measurement and Analysis for Marketing, 14, 79–98.

37.

Morris

S. B.

(2008). Estimating effect sizes from pretest-posttest-control group designs. Organizational Research Methods, 11(2), 364–386.

38.

Mukherjee

Dutta

De Bruyn

(2022). Did clickbait crack the code on virality? Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 50(3), 482–502.

39.

Normand

S. L. T.

(1999). Meta-analysis: formulating, evaluating, combining, and reporting. Statistics in Medicine, 18(3), 321–359.

40.

O’Keefe

D. J.

(2003). Message properties, mediating states, and manipulation checks: Claims, evidence, and data analysis in experimental persuasive message effects research. Communication Theory, 13(3), 251–274.

41.

Operario

Adler

N. E.

Williams

D. R.

(2004). Subjective social status: Reliability and predictive utility for global health. Psychology & Health, 19(2), 237–246.

42.

Örnebring

Jönsson

A. M.

(2004). Tabloid journalism and the public sphere: A historical perspective on tabloid journalism. Journalism Studies, 5(3), 283–295.

43.

Pennycook

McPhetres

Zhang

J. G.

Rand

D. G.

(2020). Fighting COVID-19 misinformation on social media: Experimental evidence for a scalable accuracy-nudge intervention. Psychological Science, 31(7), 770–780.

44.

Pennycook

Rand

D. G.

(2020). Who falls for fake news? The roles of bullshit receptivity, overclaiming, familiarity, and analytic thinking. Journal of Personality, 88(2), 185–200.

45.

Pennycook

Rand

D. G.

(2021). The psychology of fake news. Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 25(5), 388–402. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tics.2021.02.007

46.

Petrocelli

J. V.

Seta

C. E.

Seta

J. J.

(2023). Lies and bullshit: The negative effects of misinformation grow stronger over time. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 37(2), 409–418.

47.

Petty

R. E.

Cacioppo

J. T.

(1984). The effects of involvement on responses to argument quantity and quality: Central and peripheral routes to persuasion. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 46(1), 69–81.

48.

Petty

R. E.

Wegener

D. T.

(1998). Attitude change: Multiple roles for persuasion variables. In Gilbert

D. T.

Fiske

S. T.

Lindzey

(Eds.), The handbook of social psychology (4th ed., Vol. 1, pp. 323–390). McGraw-Hill.

49.

Phillips

S. C.

Wang

S. Y. N.

Carley

K. M.

Rand

D. G.

Pennycook

(2024, January 11). Emotional language reduces belief in false claims. https://doi.org/10.31234/osf.io/jn23a

50.

Posner

Russell

J. A.

Peterson

B. S.

(2005). The circumplex model of affect: An integrative approach to affective neuroscience, cognitive development, and psychopathology. Development and Psychopathology, 17(3), 715–734.

51.

Rajan

(2020). Coronavirus and a fake news pandemic. BBC News. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/amp/entertainment-arts-51858555

52.

Ravenelle

A. J.

Newell

Kowalski

K. C.

(2021). “The looming, crazy stalker Coronavirus”: Fear mongering, fake news, and the diffusion of distrust. Socius, 7, 23780231211024776. https://doi.org/10.1177/23780231211024776

53.

Silverman

(2015). Lies, damn lies, and viral content: How news websites spread (and debunk) online rumors, unverified claims.

54.

Taber

K. S.

(2018). The use of Cronbach’s alpha when developing and reporting research instruments in science education. Research in Science Education, 48, 1273–1296.

55.

Tan

A. S. L.

Lee

C. J.

Chae

(2015). Exposure to health (mis)information: Lagged effects on young adults’ health behaviors and potential pathways. Journal of Communication, 65(4), 674–698.

56.

Taurino

Colucci

M. H.

Bottalico

Franco

T. P.

Volpe

Violante

Grattagliano

Laera

(2023). To believe or not to believe: Personality, cognitive, and emotional factors involving fake news perceived accuracy. Applied Cognitive Psychology, 37(6), 1444–1454.

57.

Tsai

J. L.

(2007). Ideal affect: Cultural causes and behavioral consequences. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 2(3), 242–259.

58.

Viechtbauer

(2010). Conducting meta-analyses in R with the metafor package. Journal of Statistical Software, 36(3), 1–48.

59.

Wang

Lucas

Khooshabeh

De Melo

Gratch

(2015). Effects of emotional expressions on persuasion. Social Influence, 10(4), 236–249.

60.

Warriner

A. B.

Kuperman

Brysbaert

(2013). Norms of valence, arousal, and dominance for 13,915 English lemmas. Behavior Research Methods, 45, 1191–1207.

Supplementary Material

Please find the following supplemental material available below.

For Open Access articles published under a Creative Commons License, all supplemental material carries the same license as the article it is associated with.

For non-Open Access articles published, all supplemental material carries a non-exclusive license, and permission requests for re-use of supplemental material or any part of supplemental material shall be sent directly to the copyright owner as specified in the copyright notice associated with the article.

0.00 MB

0.44 MB