Emotions in risk and crisis communication: An individual and networked perspective

Emotional engagement has become a critical subject in the research and practice of risk and crisis communication. This chapter first illustrates the impacts of individuals' emotions on their cognitive processing of risk and crisis information and their attitudes and behaviors towards organizations involved in a risk or crisis. Moreover, socially mediated contexts based on networking technologies have transformed the private emotional expression of individuals into a networked and collective experience, which poses new management challenges for both organizations and publics. Based on the perspective of networked publics, this chapter further discusses the role of networked emotions in a risk and crisis context: (1) how individuals' emotional expression could be networked to form a collective emotional engagement; (2) how networked emotions can amplify the negative and positive function of individual's emotional engagement; and (3) how networked emotions can influence an organization's risk and crisis communication and management. This extends the scholarly discussion about the role of emotions in risk and crisis communication by integrating social network theories. Summing up, this chapter helps practitioners and academics better understand how the individual and networked form of publics' emotions matter for risk and crisis communication and how organizations could craft more effective communication strategies to manage collective emotions from online publics.