Emotional responses and engagement with misinformation in adolescents

Adolescents are increasingly exposed to misinformation in social media environments where emotionally salient content competes with verified information. While prior research has focused on credibility judgments, less is known about how emotional responses shape engagement with such content. This study examines how emotional responses influence adolescents’ engagement with misinformation in a simulated social media context. A within-subject experiment was conducted with 44 Romanian high-school students (ages 16, 19), who evaluated 18 war-related headlines presented in a feed-like format. Participants rated credibility, emotional responses, and their willingness to share and comment. Data were analyzed using mixed-effects models. Participants demonstrated baseline sensitivity to veracity, rating real headlines as more credible than false ones. However, engagement was more strongly associated with emotional responses than with perceived accuracy. High-arousal negative emotions, particularly fear and anger, predicted increased intentions to share and comment, whereas neutral responses were associated with minimal engagement. These findings show that adolescents’ online behavior reflects a dissociation between credibility judgments and engagement, with emotional responses playing a catalysing role. The study contributes to misinformation research by integrating cognitive and affective processes within a single experimental framework and highlights the importance of addressing not only cognitive but also emotional responses in media literacy interventions.