Investigating epistemic emotions experienced while reading refutation texts through a fine-grained measure of emotion

The current study addressed the often-overlooked role of epistemic emotions in refuting misinformation by replicating and expanding on the work of Trevors and Kendeou (2020). It broadened the participant pool beyond well-educated college students and introduced a novel dynamic measure, “DynamicEmo”, to capture epistemic emotions experienced while reading refutation texts in a more fine-grained way. Results reaffirmed that positive, negative, and standard refutation texts (vs. non-refutation texts) effectively enhanced knowledge revision. Analysis using DynamicEmo revealed that paragraphs presenting inconsistent information (misinformation+correction) in refutation texts elicited activating (curiosity and confusion) or suppressed deactivating epistemic emotions (boredom). Notably, in-the-moment negative epistemic emotions, triggered by critical correct-outcome sentences, were negatively predictive of knowledge revision, highlighting the significance of emotions experienced during critical parts of refutation text reading. This study demonstrated the key role of epistemic emotions in knowledge revision, while offering more granular insights through dynamic emotion measurement compared to traditional post-hoc self-reports.