Keywords: News, media, journalism and public opinion

The debate surrounding gun regulation has received much attention in the United States in the recent years. Discussions over policy alternatives were intensified every time when a shooting event occurred, throwing the whole nation into shock, fear, and anger again. The strong emotional elements inherent in the gun debate provide a useful context to examine how emotions affect people’s cognitive beliefs about a social problem, their likelihood to engage in the policy debate, and their preference for different policy options.

The current study proposes and tests a theoretical model that looks at how frame consistency between a news article and reader comments affects people’s emotional responses to the gun violence debate. Furthermore, it investigates how the induced emotions shape citizens’ attributional judgments, expressive intention, and policy preferences. By integrating the literature of framing and functional emotional theories, this study addresses the scholarly call for more attention to the role of emotions in public opinion research, which has traditionally focused on the cognitive processes.

Data used in the study were collected in November 2017 through an experiment-embedded survey with a 3 (news article frame) x 3 (reader comments frame) between subject design. A total of 469 participants were recruited through Qualtrics database. Both news article and reader comments were manipulated such that the messages people encounter differ in their framing of 1) human responsibility, 2) preventability of the problem, and 3) time orientation of consequences (focusing on what has happened versus what might happen).

Results showed that people tend to blame individual shooters for America’s gun violence problem. Blaming the shooter, however, did not encourage more engagement in the policy debate. More importantly, such causal beliefs stem in part from individuals’ emotional responses to mass shooting events. Specifically, when people feel angry, they are more likely to blame the lobby. On the contrary, when they feel afraid, they tend to blame the congress for not doing their job. Empirical evidence also provides partial support for the popular belief that Americans need to get angry, not sad, in order to generate substantive policy impact (Altheide, 2017). Results showed that sadness was not related to any expressive behaviors. Instead, it is people’s fear over what might be lost that leads them to take political action to have their voices heard in the legislative process.

Overall, this study found that issue-specific emotions affect individuals’ attributional judgments, expressive intention, and support for various types of policies. Adding new insight to the cognitive appraisal literature, it showed that individuals’ predispositions such as party identification affect policy preferences through making certain emotional responses more likely. Taken together, this study illustrates the importance for public opinion research to consider the potential role emotions play in the opinion formation process.