What is emotional arousal?
What emotional arousal is, how it differs from mood, and what studies of urban legends and online video ads show about the feelings people pass on.
Answer to the question
What is emotional arousal?
Emotional arousal is the level of activation that comes with a feeling, from calm and settled to stirred and ready to act. It is separate from whether a feeling is pleasant, and research on sharing links high-arousal feelings such as awe, anger and amusement to more sharing than low-arousal ones.
Key takeaways
- Emotional arousal is the activation a feeling brings, and it is a separate axis from whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant.
- Jonah Berger's Contagious sorts awe, amusement, anger and anxiety as high arousal, and contentment and sadness as low arousal.
- In three studies of urban legends, people passed on stories that stirred stronger disgust, with truth held constant (Heath, Bell and Sternberg, 2001).
- Two preregistered replications in 2024 found no effect of arousal induced beforehand on willingness to share, so the useful claim concerns the feeling the content itself evokes (Prowten and colleagues).
- In two field studies of online video ads coding 11 emotions and more than 60 characteristics, amusement, excitement, inspiration and warmth raised sharing (Tellis, MacInnis, Tirunillai and Zhang, 2019).
Awe and contentment are both pleasant, yet one is forwarded within minutes and the other mostly stays where it began. The difference is emotional arousal, the activation a feeling brings with it.
What is emotional arousal, and is it mood?
Jonah Berger's Contagious builds its chapter on emotion around one point: how strongly a feeling pushes a person to act can matter more for sharing than whether the feeling is pleasant. Emotional arousal is the level of activation that comes with a feeling. Put plainly, emotional arousal is the body's readiness to act. A high-arousal state readies a person to do something: speak, move, react, pass something on. A low-arousal state does the opposite and settles the person down. It is a separate axis from whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant, which is why two feelings with the same tone can behave so differently once they are put into words and sent to someone else.
The table below sorts six familiar feelings along both axes, following the way Contagious sorts them.
| Feeling | Arousal | Tone |
|---|---|---|
| Awe | High | Pleasant |
| Amusement | High | Pleasant |
| Anger | High | Unpleasant |
| Anxiety | High | Unpleasant |
| Contentment | Low | Pleasant |
| Sadness | Low | Unpleasant |
The middle column carries the book's argument. Each tone has a high-arousal member and a low-arousal member, so a content calm and a stirring wonder can both be called good news and still differ in how far they travel. A large set of newspaper articles split along these lines too, which is the pattern in Why Sad Posts Go Viral Less Often, and the concept page on emotional arousal holds the longer definition.
Which feelings get passed on?
Chip Heath, Chris Bell and Emily Sternberg tested a related idea in three studies of urban legends. With truth and other informational factors held constant, people were more willing to pass along stories that stirred stronger disgust. When the researchers wrote versions of randomly sampled legends that differed in how much disgust they produced, people chose to pass on the strongest version. Legends built from more disgust-linked story motifs, such as something contaminated being eaten, also appeared more widely on urban legend websites.
The authors call this emotional selection, the idea the concept page on emotional selection traces through Contagious: stories survive partly by how much they make people feel, and not only by how accurate or useful they are.
It follows that the opposite also holds. A story that leaves the listener with little to feel has little to push it onward, however sound it is. Bernard Rimé's review of the social sharing of emotion adds the human side of the picture: people routinely talk with others about emotional episodes, and he sets out several reasons adults do it and examines sharing at both the interpersonal and the collective level. Sharing, on this account, is part of how a feeling is lived, so an item that carries strong emotional arousal arrives with a ready reason to be told.
A tempting shortcut says that anything that raises a person's heart rate will make them share. A 2011 laboratory study pointed that way, but two preregistered replications by S. Prowten and colleagues in 2024 found no effect of incidental arousal on willingness to share. The shortcut is therefore not a safe working rule. What holds up better is the narrower claim that content which itself evokes a high-arousal feeling gives the reader something to act on. The arousal belongs to the story, in other words, and cannot be borrowed from a jog around the block.
That narrower claim also explains why a sad post and an awe-filled one can differ in reach even when both are well made. The sad post settles the reader. The awe-filled post unsettles them in a pleasant way, and the reader looks for someone to tell. False or misleading items follow a different pattern, driven by attention and habit more than by feeling, as Why do people share fake news? shows.
A thought experiment shows the difference: a short film about a sunrise over a vast canyon and a short film about a quiet evening at home are both warm, but only the first hands the viewer a feeling large enough to need an audience. Berger's wider framework, which also covers what makes content go viral, places this next to social currency, the idea that people share what makes them look good, and the two accounts often work together rather than compete.
The rule is also easy to overstate. Strong emotional arousal is one ingredient among several, and nobody has shown that it guarantees sharing. A reader's friends, the setting and the moment all enter. The question the evidence on emotional arousal can answer is narrower: when two similar pieces differ in the feeling they stir, which one tends to travel?
What did the ad studies show?
Gerard Tellis, Deborah MacInnis, Seshadri Tirunillai and Yanwei Zhang studied what drives the sharing of online video ads across several social platforms. They ran two independent field studies that coded 11 emotions and more than 60 characteristics of each ad, then tested five hypotheses drawn from theory. Positive emotions of amusement, excitement, inspiration and warmth raised sharing. Dramatic elements such as surprise, plot and characters, including babies and animals, were what aroused those emotions. Content that leaned on information more than on feeling was shared less, except in risky contexts. Sharing peaked when an ad ran for a moderate length, about 1.2 to 1.7 minutes.
The findings sit well beside the table of emotional arousal levels: amusement and excitement are both active, outward-facing feelings. A third study then used the drivers it had identified to predict sharing in an entirely independent sample, and the prediction was accurate. For anyone choosing what to put in front of an audience, the finding to keep is that content built to stir an active, positive feeling was the content that travelled in that data. The independent sample matters because the drivers were identified on one set of ads and checked on another, which is a harder test than describing what had already happened.
Common questions
What is emotional arousal?
Emotional arousal is the level of activation that comes with a feeling, from calm and settled to stirred and ready to act. It is separate from whether the feeling is pleasant or unpleasant, and high-arousal feelings such as awe, anger and amusement are the ones linked to more sharing.
Does a high-arousal feeling always make people share?
No. Strong feeling is one ingredient. Two preregistered replications found that arousal induced before reading did not raise willingness to share, so the useful version of the idea concerns the feeling the content itself evokes.
Do only positive feelings get shared?
No. Anger and anxiety are high-arousal feelings with an unpleasant tone, and the table sorts them with awe and amusement. In a field study of video ads, though, positive feelings such as amusement, excitement, inspiration and warmth increased sharing.
Why do stories that stir disgust spread?
In three studies of urban legends, people passed on stories that produced stronger disgust, and legends with more disgust-linked motifs spread more widely on legend websites. The authors call this emotional selection.
Sources
Berger, J. Contagious. Seed book; vault hub Books/Contagious.
Heath, C., Bell, C., & Sternberg, E. (2001). Emotional selection in memes: The case of urban legends. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 81(6), 1028-1041. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1028 https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.81.6.1028
Rime, B. (2009). Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review. Emotion Review, 1(1), 60-85. doi:10.1177/1754073908097189 https://doi.org/10.1177/1754073908097189
Prowten, S., Walker, E., London, B., Pearce, E., Napoli, A., Chenevert, B., Clevenger, C., & Smith, A. R. (2024). Does physiological arousal increase social transmission of information? Two replications of Berger (2011). Psychological Science. doi:10.1177/09567976241257255 https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976241257255
Tellis, G. J., MacInnis, D. J., Tirunillai, S., & Zhang, Y. (2019). What drives virality (sharing) of online digital content? The critical role of information, emotion, and brand prominence. Journal of Marketing. doi:10.1177/0022242919841034 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022242919841034