ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Commun.
Sec. Advertising and Marketing Communication
Volume 10 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fcomm.2025.1553581
This article is part of the Research TopicUsing Narratives to Promote Risks and Risky Products: Cautions and ConsiderationsView all 3 articles
Go With The Flow: Testing the Effects of Emotional Flow on Attitudinal and Behavioral Changes
Provisionally accepted
- University of South Florida, Tampa, United States
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Abstract Emotions are important constructs that affect the lives of everyone. Emotions play a particularly strong role in persuasion. This study examines the concept of emotional flow, a sequencing of specific discrete emotions in a strategic manner to affect attitudes and behaviors. An experiment was conducted using a public service announcement about melanoma that contained a sequence that flowed from humor to sadness to hope in order to understand the functions and applicability of emotional flow, specifically within health contexts. Using Mood Management Theory and Excitation Transfer Theory as guides, results showed that participants who viewed a humor-sadness-hope emotional flow had higher levels of arousal compared to those who viewed humor-sadness or humor-sadness-neutral emotional flows. The humor-sadness-hope emotional flow resulted in higher levels of pleasure compared to those who viewed the humor-sadness emotional flow. Arousal was identified as a mediator between emotional flow and both message engagement and risk perceptions. Additionally, sadness was found to moderate the relationship between emotional flow and both attitude and message engagement.
Keywords: emotional flow, Arousal, Valence, Health Communication, Excitation transfer, mood management
Received: 30 Dec 2024; Accepted: 07 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 R. Noland. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Chris R. Noland, cnoland@usf.edu
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