ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Neurosci.
Sec. Decision Neuroscience
Volume 19 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fnins.2025.1636848
This article is part of the Research TopicNeuroJourney: decoding customer behavior through brain pathwaysView all 5 articles
Disrupting the Browsing Experience: Impact of Sponsored Social Media Content on Affective Flow Without Driving Engagement
Provisionally accepted
- 1Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, Mülheim, Germany
- 2Universiteit Twente, Enschede, Netherlands
- 3Universidade NOVA de Lisboa NOVA Information Management School, Lisbon, Portugal
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Understanding how emotional experiences shape consumer behavior in digital environments is a central issue in decision-making neuroscience. This study aimed to investigate how users emotionally process and behaviorally engage with marketing content embedded within social media feeds. Based on decision neuroscience frameworks and models of affective processing, this study introduces a three-layer analytical model to capture the emotional microstructure of scrolling behavior. Using facial expression analysis, skin conductance, and real-time engagement data from participants navigating a simulated social media feed, this study mapped affective rhythms and their modulation based on content type. The findings revealed that browsing was predominantly neutral in tone and punctuated by momentary spikes in arousal and positivity. Sponsored content disrupted this neutrality without increasing arousal levels, indicating a subtle shift in affective flow rather than emotional amplification. Contrary to common assumptions, biometric indicators of emotional intensity did not predict engagement behavior. These results suggest that commercial content may influence decision-making not through heightened emotional salience but by interrupting habitual affective continuity, highlighting the need for revised persuasion models that account for rhythm disruption, cognitive reappraisal, and trait-level user variability.
Keywords: emotional disruption, Micro-Customer Journey, native advertising, Facial expression analysis, Galvanic Skin Response, User engagement
Received: 28 May 2025; Accepted: 14 Aug 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Hübner, Thalmann and Henseler. 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: Maike Hübner, Ruhr West University of Applied Sciences, Mülheim, Germany
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