When Image Emotion Outpaces Text: The Role of Emotional Intensity Incongruity in Driving Engagement on Instagram

Drawing on Emotion As Social Information Theory, Cognitive Dissonance Theory, and the Elaboration Likelihood Model, we investigate how mismatched emotional intensity across visual and textual modalities impacts engagement. We analyze how the relative emotional dominance of the visual modality—measured as the raw difference in emotional intensity between image and text within a post—affects engagement. Our dataset includes 829,602 Instagram posts from 28,827 North American, English-speaking influencers, each annotated with probabilistic intensity scores across six basic emotions: anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness, or surprise. The results demonstrate that when image-based emotional intensity exceeds textual expression—captured as the signed difference between the two—comment counts increase across most emotions, suggesting that engagement is sensitive not just to the magnitude, but to the direction of emotional imbalance. However, consistent with Cognitive Dissonance Theory, this positive effect diminishes and reverses beyond a critical threshold of emotional intensity incongruity between image and text.