Life Desk :
Viral content typically evokes high-arousal emotions. However, research suggests that arousal is just one of the underlying drivers of viral content. High dominance may be another key driver behind content that is widely shared.
New work from Jacopo Staiano of Sorbonne University and Marco Guerini of Trento Rise sheds light on the roles that valence, arousal and dominance play in viral content. The findings indicate that what really matters may be where the emotions fall within the Valence-Arousal-Dominance model. This scale is frequently used in psychology to categorise emotions. Each emotion is a combination of three characteristics.
Valence is the positivity or negativity of an emotion. Happiness has a positive valence; fear has negative. Arousal ranges from excitement to relaxation. Anger is a high-arousal emotion; sadness is lowarousal. Dominance ranges from submission to feeling in control. Fear is low-dominance; an emotion a person has more choice over, such as admiration, is high-dominance.
The researchers looked at 65,000 articles on two news sites where readers had assigned emotional scores to articles. They then looked for patterns among the viral stories, by the number of comments and social shares each article received. A clear connection appeared between instances of viral content and certain configurations of valence, arousal and dominance.
From “The Emotional Combinations That Make Stories Go Viral”
– By Kerry Jones Et Al, ToI.
