Abstract
This study aims to elucidate the intricate interplay between public attention and public emotion toward multiple social issues. A theoretical framework is developed based on three perspectives including endogenous affect hypothesis, affect transfer hypothesis, and affective intelligence theory. Large-scale longitudinal data with 265 million tweets on five social issues are analyzed using a time series analytical approach. Public attention on social issues can influence public emotion on the issue per se. Social issues interact with one another to attract public attention in both cooperative and competitive ways. Instead of a direct transfer from public emotion to public attention, the public emotion toward a social issue moderates the interaction between the issue and other issue(s).
Highlights
The dynamic recruitment and distraction of public attention toward social issues has been an intriguing yet unanswered question in political communication research
Public attention rarely focuses on a single issue for a long period, and the public tends to allocate their attention among several social issues in a dynamic way
Psychological literature has rejected such assumption and argued that the public is a collection of individuals who experience various emotional states toward several social issues [69]
Summary
The dynamic recruitment and distraction of public attention toward social issues has been an intriguing yet unanswered question in political communication research. Few studies have investigated the intricate link between what issues the general public thinks about (i.e., public attention) and how they feel about these issues (i.e., public emotion). The missing link between public attention and public emotion has its conceptual and methodological causes. Most studies on emotion and politics employed retrospective self-reported measures to observe public emotion toward political objects, such as political campaigns [12], candidates [13], and social issues [14].
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