Proposing Emotion as a Dimension of Affective Agenda Setting: Separating Affect into Two Components and Comparing Their Second-Level Effects

Abstract

This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include emotion as affect and seeks to understand its valence. Three important findings emerged; first, the media's emotional-affective agenda corresponds with the public's emotional impressions of candidates; second, negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions even when the topic is not a negative “problem”; and third, agenda-setting effects are greater on the audiences' emotions, defined as feelings, than on their cognitive assessments of character traits, the most common way affect is measured in agenda-setting studies.