Impact of Emotional Awareness on Responses to Vaccine-Related Narrative Misinformation

Gaylord National 

Emotionally evocative narratives are a common strategy to spread vaccine-related misinformation on social media, posing a potential threat to public health. This study tested the potential use of two emotional awareness strategies-affect labeling and reflections of feelings-to mitigate the impact of narrative misinformation. Using misinformation about HPV vaccines as a case, we found that emotional awareness did not affect sharing intentions, but increased concerns about HPV vaccine safety among female participants. Moreover, narrative transportation mediated the effect, such that female participants experienced greater transportation, leading to higher intentions to share misinformation and greater concerns about HPV vaccine safety. However, non-female participants experienced less transportation, resulting in lower intentions to share misinformation and fewer concerns about HPV vaccine safety. Affect labeling and reflections of feelings did not differ significantly in intentions or concerns. These findings suggest that emotional awareness manipulations in their current form may not be effective at addressing HPV vaccine-related narrative misinformation, especially for female participants. Future work needs to develop emotional awareness-based interventions to guide individuals to better manage and respond to emotionally evocative narrative misinformation on social media.