| In public health events,news reports,as an important information channel for the public to recognize events,influence the public’s perception of risk and relieve negative emotions in society.At present,China is in the normal stage of COVID-19 prevention and control.It has become a hot topic concerned by all sectors of society how to improve the information release system of public health events.The framing effect theory in health communication holds that media frame is the dominant frame that information publishers use to define news events.Information publishers can influence audience’s cognition and emotion through media framing.However,in existing studies,the role of emotion in framing effect is still controversial,and the measurement of emotion is not accurate enough.Based on the Media Frame Theory and Cognitive-Emotional Theory,this paper explores the influence of fact frame and influence frame on audiences’ cognition of the effectiveness of domestic vaccines,as well as the emotional changes and mechanism in the background of the current normalization of COVID-19 prevention and control.In this way,we can determine how to release information can effectively improve the audience’s cognition of the event,relieve social emotions,and provide empirical basis for improving the accuracy and pertinence of information release.Based on Cognitive-Emotional Theory and PAD emotional state model,this study designed a theoretical model and measured variables.By conducting questionnaire survey and psychological experiment,we designed stimulus materials conforming to the definition of media frame,collected participants’ cognitive and emotional responses to different media frames,explored the influence of categories and tendencies of media frame on audience cognition,and investigated the mediating effect of emotion on frame effect.The research conclusions showed that:(1)both fact frame and influence frame have significant impacts on effectiveness cognition of domestic vaccines,and the fact frame has a more significant impact on the cognition of the audience than the influence frame;(2)reports of both tendencies have impacts on audience cognition,and reports of positive tendency have more significant impacts on audience than reports of negative tendency;(3)Emotion plays A mediating role in the influence of media frame on cognition.The activation degree(A)and dominance degree(D)of emotion play A significant mediating role.The fact frame is less likely to cause the audience to disregard the reported content than the influence frame,while the positive frame is more likely to let the audience to feel happy than the negative frame.All hypotheses have been tested.The innovations of this study are as follows.On one hand,this paper examines the differences between cognitive-emotional theory and cognitive evaluation theory about the role of emotion.The results support the emotional mechanism of cognitiveemotional theory in which emotion plays a mediating role in the influence of media frame on cognition.In addition,this study also examined the conflicting conclusions of previous studies on the impact of reporting tendency on cognition,and the results showed that positive reporting tendency had a more significant impact on the audience in the effectiveness of domestic vaccines.On the other hand,this study optimizes the selection and measurement methods of variables in existing studies.By introducing PAD emotional state model,continuous emotion variables are constructed in this study,and the direction of emotion change induced by different media frames is obtained,which refines the measurement granularity of emotion variables.This paper empirically examines the mechanism of the framing effect proposed in cognitive-emotional theory affecting cognition through emotion,and constructs a continuous measurement method of emotion variables,which provides a good reference for further enriching the empirical research of cognitive-emotional theory.The empirical results of this paper provide a theoretical reference for information publishers to rationally select media frame categories and the reporting tendency,and provide some practical guidance for channeling public emotions and constructing relevant public cognition in public health events. |
