From Viewing to Sharing: The Role of Emotions in Spreading Climate Change Content on YouTube
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.5294/pacla.2022.25.2.6Keywords:
Climate change, communication, science, dissemination, environment, social mediaAbstract
Climate change is the most significant environmental challenge of the century. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has clarified that a half-a-degree Celsius warmer Earth will mean the difference between life and death. Against this backdrop, communication on climate change is of paramount importance to make individual and government commitments to combat this problem, accentuated above all by the action of human activities. This research aims to delve into emotional psychology and environmental communication to explain the popularity of climate change content on YouTube. Using videos that address environmental issues, the authors examine how emotions that produce physiological arousal result in mass diffusion. The results indicate that, regardless of the valence of videos (i.e., whether considered positive or negative), they can become popular to the extent that they promote viewers’ physiological arousal. This finding sheds light on why people share environmental content and how to design campaigns to fight climate change.
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