Table 2 Theories involved in this research and their functions.
Theory | Content | Function |
|---|---|---|
Affective information processing theory | The theory of affective information processing indicates that users engage in affective information processing (Walla 2018). Affective processing involves the unconscious automatic assessment of the pleasant/unpleasant aspects of a stimulus and forms the basis of any human behaviour (Lutz et al. 2023). | The affective information processing theoretical model provides the research motivation for this study, that is, the fact that affective information processing underlies users’ information sharing behaviour explains why we want to study debunking information sharing from an emotional perspective. |
Emotional contagion theory | The theory of emotional contagion states that emotional transmission can occur through three mechanisms: mimicry (Hess and Fischer 2014), category activation (Chen et al. 2023; Raab et al. 2020), and social appraisal (Clément and Dukes 2017). | The emotional contagion theory provides the theoretical basis for this study, that is, based on the theory, the emotion embedded in the debunking information can be received by social media users as an external stimulus and trigger the subsequent affective information processing process. |
Circumplex theories of emotion | Circumplex theories of emotion postulate that all emotions are composed of two orthogonal dimensions: valence and arousal (Pool et al. 2016). | The circumplex theories of emotion provide support for why we should study both emotional valence and discrete emotions. |
Emotion wheel model | The wheel of emotions defined eight primary emotion categories: anger, fear, joy, sadness, disgust, anticipation, surprise, and trust (Plutchik 1980). | The emotion wheel model guided our selection of discrete emotions and provided an understanding of the characteristics of different discrete emotions. |
ECT | ECT assumes that expectations can be either positively confirmed (perceived performance exceeds expectations) or negatively confirmed (perceived performance is below expectations) (Lee et al. 2020). | ECT provides support for the moderating role of rumour subject reputation. |
