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

Emotionally evocative narratives are a common strategy to spread vaccine-related misinformation on social media. This study tested the use of two emotional awareness strategies – affect labeling and reflections of feelings – to mitigate the impact of misinformation. The online experiment (N = 143) found that emotional awareness (vs. control) led to greater felt emotions and concerns about HPV vaccine safety among female participants. Felt emotions further mediated the effect of emotional awareness (vs. control) on intentions to share misinformation and concerns about HPV vaccine safety. These findings suggest that emotional awareness may be ineffective at addressing narrative misinformation on social media.