News frames on pro-immigrant attitude promotion: A comparison among threatening, empathetic, and neutral emotional appeals

It is common for political elites and media campaigns to utilize emotional appeals to influence public attitudes toward political candidates as well as political issues. While threat has been shown to elicit opposition to immigration, studies have found empathy with asylum seekers to promote support toward immigrant policies. Even though the literature has suggested how emotional frames can impact political attitudes across a diversity of issues, few have examined and compared different emotional news frames in terms of their effectiveness to impact public opinion and policy decisions (i.e., persuasiveness and perceived message credibility).

To compare the effectiveness of the different emotional appeals (threat vs. empathy vs. neutral), this study created three versions of a news story about undocumented immigrants being victims in the United States. While the threatening story utilized emotional words to depict immigrants’ fear, the empathetic story utilized emotional words and direct quotations to arouse compassion among news audiences. The neutral news story was written to depict a similar story but without any emotional words and direct quotations. These manipulations were then embedded in a web-based survey and were distributed to the US population through Amazon Mechanical Turk (N = 402).

The findings suggest that, anti-immigrant participants perceive the threatening story to be less fair than the neutral story as well as less credible than the empathetic story. In other words, if the goal is to promote positive attitudes toward immigrants among anti-immigrant participants, empathetic and neutral frames are both better choices when compared to the threatening story. On the other hand, pro-immigrant participants find the empathetic and threatening stories as more persuasive than the story written in neutral tone. Hence, if the aim is to mobilize pro-immigrant participants to engage in related activities such as signing a petition and attending a protest, both empathy and threat frames serve better candidates than neutral frame.

To conclude, this study contributes to the framing literature by comparing the effects of different emotional appeal (threat and empathy alongside with neutral frame) on persuasion and media perceptions. In addition, it speaks to how political elites and media practitioners can best persuade audiences to achieve their aims as campaign and promotional strategies, probably through the use of empathy.