The cognitive-emotional pathway to information dissemination: source and content effects on Weibo during natural disasters

This study examines the dynamic relationships between information sources, information content, and dissemination behavior on social media during natural disasters. Drawing on the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S-O-R) framework and dual-process theory, we analyze 68,166 Weibo posts related to the 2025 Tibet earthquake using a vector autoregression model with exogenous variables (VARX). The results reveal systematic differences in how source-related and content-related cues shape dissemination dynamics.

In the short term, source credibility and source activity are associated with decreases in dissemination behavior, whereas source influence, information severity, and information susceptibility are associated with increases. Over time, the influence of source characteristics weakens, while content-related cues continue to be linked with dissemination dynamics. Collective cognitive and emotional expressions also play important intermediary roles in these relationships.

Cognitive expressions are more strongly associated with content-related cues, whereas emotional expressions are more closely linked with source-related cues. These findings contribute to a better understanding of how source-related and content-related cues shape aggregate cognitive-emotional expression and dissemination dynamics during natural disasters, offering implications for emergency communication practices in social media environments using time-series evidence from large-scale Weibo data. Our research is supported by the National Social Science Fund project of China “Research on the Psychological Mechanism and Effectiveness of Rumor Refutation Information Dissemination in Major Emergencies” (Grant number: 24BTQ053).

This research was funded by the National Social Science Fund of China, grant number 24BTQ053. Liaoning Normal University, Dalian, Liaoning, China Dalian University of Technology, Dalian, China Shandong University of Technology, Zibo, China The authors declare no competing interests. This article does not contain any studies with human participants performed by any of the authors.

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