Affective Framing of Environmental News Headlines Influences Engagement, Donations, and Memory

Negativity motivates people to read and share news, but can also harm mental health and discourage action. We tested an alternate route to engagement—evoking positive emotions by emphasizing action to address a problem. In two experiments, we adapted environmental news headlines to feature different aspects of each story, emphasizing Crisis or Action. Both Crisis and Action framing (and negative and positive emotions, respectively) motivated reading and sharing, relative to the unaltered headlines. Crucially, consistent with theoretical predictions, we identified a trade-off: Crisis framing had the strongest effects on immediate engagement (increasing sharing and charitable donations), but Action framing enhanced future memory for news content. In a third study, we computationally classified content in >25,000 news articles on social media; Action and Crisis framing were both associated with increased engagement. Overall, we demonstrate that the affective framing of news modulates reading, sharing, donations, and memory in laboratory and real-world settings.