The impact of event type and geographical proximity on threat appraisal and emotional reactions to Wikipedia articles

The online encyclopedia Wikipedia strives for objectivity and neutrality. However, Wikipedia also provides articles about negative events (e.g., earthquakes, terrorist attacks) that likely elicit strong, negative emotions. These emotions might slip into Wikipedia articles. Previous research has demonstrated that Wikipedia articles on terrorist attacks contained more anger-related content than Wikipedia articles on earthquakes. This previous research focused on the expression of emotional reactions in existing Wikipedia articles and used an automatic linguistic analysis tool that counted the number of emotion-related words. In order to extend this approach, the first aim of the present research was to replicate these findings by focusing on the emotional reactions during and after reading the articles. Second, previous research did not look at the geographical location of the negative events, which may be a relevant, influential factor. Emotional reactions may be stronger for geographically closer events (i.e., Europe for Europeans) than for geographically more distant events (i.e., Asia). Two studies, one with few raters rating their emotional reactions to many Wikipedia articles (S1 Study) and another with many raters rating their emotional reactions to few Wikipedia articles (S1 Study), demonstrated that Wikipedia articles on terrorist attacks elicited more threat, anger, sadness, and anxiety than Wikipedia articles on earthquakes. These effects occurred for negative events in Europe but were absent for events in Asia, with one exception. The anger effect was the same across Europe and Asia. Thus, event type and geographical proximity are relevant factors for explaining threat and emotional reactions to Wikipedia articles.