In light of the growing use of the Internet to access news, this dissertation first aimed to explore how message-relevant, discrete emotions (anger, fear, and hope) affect online news message processing, information seeking, and preferences for policies related to news topics. Second, in response to the now ubiquitous presence of social media sharing buttons on major news websites, this dissertation sought to understand the role that emotion plays in the news sharing process, including motivations for sharing and how emotions influence the specific responses that people want to receive after sharing.

452 undergraduates participated in a 4 (Emotion Type: anger, fear, hope, no emotion) x 2 (Emotion Goal Relevant Information: present vs. not present) x 2 (Website Browsing: browse vs. no browse) experiment. On an online news website developed for the purposes of this study, participants were first instructed to read an emotionally-framed news message about texting and driving. Participants in the website browsing conditions were allowed up to 8 minutes to select other stories on the site that varied in their topic and emotion relevance by clicking on hyperlinks. Participants were free to share any story they read with their online social networks. Their patterns of website browsing and exposure times were automatically recorded. Emotional responses, policy preferences, story recognition, and reasons for sharing were measured after the experimental treatment.

Results indicated that the approach emotions of anger and especially hope lead to a willingness to stay on a message page longer than the avoidant emotion of fear. However, negative emotions promoted better recognition of story details than did hope. The results also support the notion that discrete emotions differentially affect information seeking consistent with Nabi's (1999) predictions. In terms of news sharing, the findings support the idea that social sharing in public forums should be viewed as an emotion-specific phenomenon as participants were more willing to share anger- than fear-evoking stories and desired responses to shared information differed among emotions. Overall, the findings deepen our understanding of the role that emotion plays in determining how news consumers respond to and engage with content presented on online news sites.