Emotion-Based Social-Mediated Crisis Communication Research Development: A Systematic Review

Background and literature review: Social media not only facilitates two-way interactions between organizations and stakeholders but also threatens organizational reputation and legitimacy during crises. This dual role has flourished the growth in social-mediated crisis communication scholarship examining the evolving dynamics in requiring organizations to adapt response strategies.

Social media’s emotional contagion effects create environments where publics’ emotions are not merely reactive but actively shape crisis interpretation and diffusion (Lu & Huang, 2018). Emotionally charged discussions among stakeholders amplify crises, attract peripheral audiences, and risk secondary crises (Xu et al., 2024). Organizations face challenges in balancing rational messaging with emotional validation to navigate these dynamics. The interplay of emotion-driven stakeholder networks and algorithmic bias requires revisiting theoretical frameworks and practices to address modern social-mediated realities (Xu et al., 2024).

Study aims: This study aims to understand the theory building and practices of emotion-based social-mediated crisis communication through a systematic review to: 1) investigate the current research trend of emotion-based social-mediated crisis communication; 2) study the relevant variables and concepts to enhance our understanding of emotion-driven trends in crisis communication research as social-mediated crises vary across socio-political contexts, influencing emotional discourse among stakeholder groups (Ao et al., 2022), 3) identify the research gaps in response strategies, outcomes, and contextual factors between traditional rational-based stakeholder perceptions (Lu & Huang, 2018) and emotion-laden contexts with affective responses over cognitive processing (Forgas, 2006), resulting in escalating conflicts through emotional commentary (Ao & Mak, 2021); and 4) map the emotional expression patterns among stakeholders as public-to-public interactions—critical in shaping outcomes like boycotts or reputational damage in organizational crises (Austin et al., 2012)—require detailed analysis of emotion targets and sources.

RQ1. What are the trends and patterns of emotion-based social-mediated crisis communication research?
RQ2. What a) social media types, b) crisis types, and c) organizational types do emotion-based social-mediated crisis communication studies investigate?
RQ3. What emotions are expressed, by whom, and to whom in emotion-based social-mediated crises?
RQ4. To what extent are the a) crisis response strategies, b) outcomes, and c) contextual factors examined in previous emotion-based social-mediated crisis communication research?

Methods: Targeting all SSCI journal articles, an electronic search was performed on Web of Science in July 2024 in order to identify the relevant studies. The search process was first targeted toward publications containing keywords related to social media platforms and crises in their titles, abstracts, and keywords. Two graduate students further filtered out articles that were not related to crisis communication research on social media. The initial search resulted in 1,964 articles. Second, to ensure inclusion is relevant to emotions, we used the emotion-related keywords (e.g., emotion, sentiment, anger, disgust, shame, and joy) for the second part of the selection. At this stage, 1,362 of them were removed due to not satisfying the criterion. In the third step, two coders manually screened abstracts of the remaining articles to confirm alignment with crisis communication and emotional focus. If the information provided by the title or the abstract was inadequate for making the decision, the first and corresponding authors would read the full paper in order to determine if it needed to be excluded. Finally, 358 articles remained for the coding analysis.

We conducted a content analysis on the selected articles, the unit of analysis was each article. The preliminary coding scheme contained four categories which will be explained below. The first category pertained to the general information of the studies, encompassing items such as journal names, article titles, and publication years. The second category addressed the theoretical and methodological approaches, incorporating items such as the technologies under study, types of organizations examined, theoretical frameworks, and research topics, data collection methods, and unit of analysis. The third category contained variables about emotions, including the emotion type, sources of emotional expression (e.g., organizations, publics), and expression targets. The fourth category was in relation to types crises, including crisis types, response strategies, contextual factors, and communication outcomes.

Two graduate students in communication were selected and trained for coding. After achieving satisfactory inter-coder reliability (Krippendorff’s α) using a randomly selected subset of 30 articles (8.4% of the sample), they will complete coding for the remaining articles. Results of this study will provide a comprehensive overview of the state of emotion-driven social-mediated crisis communication theory development and research practice, and identify some distinct characteristics for crisis communication scholars to properly define this emerging trend of study across sociopolitical contexts.