Emotional Arousal

What it is

Psychologists describe a feeling along two separate lines. One is valence, how good or bad it feels. The other is arousal, how much it activates you. The two come apart easily: anger and awe feel very different, yet both leave you keyed up, while sadness and calm contentment both leave you still.

Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman applied that distinction to sharing. They scored every article the New York Times published over three months for the emotions it evoked and tracked which ones readers emailed on. Positive articles were shared more than negative ones overall, but the larger pattern ran along the arousal line: articles evoking awe, anger or anxiety travelled further, and articles evoking sadness travelled less.

In effect

For anybody publishing, the useful question about a piece is what it leaves a reader wanting to do. Content that activates tends to travel, whether the feeling is pleasant or not. Content that moves people while leaving them still tends to stay where it is.

That cuts against a common instinct in brand work. Warm, wistful content is safe and can be good for a brand, but on this evidence it is not a sharing strategy, and the two goals are worth keeping apart rather than measuring as one.

What it does not say

It does not show that arousal on its own causes sharing. The 2012 paper adds experiments that its authors read as showing that the emotions in the content drive sharing. A separate experiment by Berger, in which arousal came from jogging on the spot rather than from the content, did not hold when Prowten and colleagues repeated it twice with larger groups in 2024, so arousal cut loose from what the content makes you feel is the part not to lean on.

It does not say outrage is a good idea. A finding about what spreads is not a finding about what deserves to spread.

It does not settle how sharing works now. The data come from one newspaper's email feature, before ranking algorithms sat between readers and what they share, and the emotions were judged from the articles rather than measured in the readers.

---