Motivated processing of online news comments : how do incivility and belief congruence affect comment readers' cognitive and emotional responses?

[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] The present study examined how the presence of incivility in online comments (i.e. uncivil comments) influences individual online news user's cognitive and emotional responses. In specific, by conceptualizing incivility in online comments as a message feature which influences news users' motivational system activations, this study investigates audience' real-time responses during their processing of online comments through psychophysiological measures along with self-reports and memory measures. The study also explored how different viewpoints expressed in the online comments as function of consistent or inconsistent with audience pre-existing viewpoint may modulate the level of activation in motivational systems, thus influencing comment readers' cognitive and emotional responses. The findings suggested that uncivil comments resulted in greater negative emotional response (indexed by increased self report negativity, anger and arousal) and enhanced cognitive resource allocation (indexed by heart rate deceleration) to encoding the comments compared to civil comments. Further, belief-incongruent comment also elicited greater negative emotional response (indexed by self-report negativity, anger and physiological and self-report arousal) and stronger intention to post a comment, compared to belief-congruent comments. At last, comments incivility and belief congruence interact with each other to affect one's positive emotional responses (indexed by orbicularis oculi responses) and perceived credibility of the main news messages.