Attitudes or Emotions as News Compasses? Comparing Attitudinal and Emotional Guidance in Selecting News About Migration

This study compares the guiding influence of political attitudes and emotions on citizens’ news selection within a fragmented, polarized, and emotionalized political information environment. While selective exposure has long been a central focus in research on political information behavior, the guiding role of emotions has received far less attention. This study brings both perspectives together by directly comparing how pre-existing attitudes and momentary emotional responses shape citizens’ news choices. Using migration as a salient and contested issue, an online experiment conducted in Germany in June 2025 ( N  = 1,002) tested how framing variations in political stance (supportive, balanced, opposing migration) and emotional valence (positive, unemotional, negative) shape citizens’ news choices, and how these effects depend on individuals’ pre-existing attitudes and induced emotional responses toward migration. Results reveal a clear negativity bias: negatively valenced and contra-migration news were chosen most frequently, whereas positive and pro-migration ones were least preferred. Negative affect increased the likelihood of selecting negatively framed news, while positive affect showed no effect. In contrast, pre-existing attitudes exerted stronger and more consistent guidance, as citizens predominantly selected attitude-congruent information. The findings highlight how affective and cognitive orientations jointly shape selective exposure and suggest possible implications for how such patterns may unfold in algorithmically curated political information environments.