A growing number of scholars acknowledge emotionality as a powerful and relevant force in the news framing process. Extant studies predominantly investigate the role emotions play in limiting or enhancing framing effects. However, the role emotions play in mediating news framing effects on opinion and attitudes remains understudied. So far, mediation in framing has been mainly described in cognitive ways, with a focus on the function of frames in rendering certain considerations more important (e.g., Nelson et al., 1997). Also, the role of specific emotions in the framing process has not been determined empirically. To fill this void, we integrated four emotions into a framing experiment (n = 161), testing how influential each of these emotions is for the framing effect process. We find that news frames cause affective responses, which in turn lead to higher or lower level of support for a political issue. What is more, we show that only some emotions (in our case, anger and enthusiasm) significantly mediated the framing effect, whereas others (contentment and fear) did not. We consider this study an important and exploratory anti-dote to the ‘cognitive bias’ in news framing effects research – which we have also been guilty of in our own work.
