Effect of Emotion on Content Engagement in Social Media Communication: A Short Review of Current Methods and a Call for Neurophysiological Methods

Engagement with content is vital for companies to achieve overall marketing goals (e.g., sales). Emotional content has the potential to grab attention and evoke the desired engagement. Our goal is to review the research methods used in the extant literature on the emotional effect on content engagement in social media communication. The findings show an unbalanced use of methods. Content analysis and emotion coding procedures are the dominant methods, while other methods have hardly been used. Based on this finding, we argue that future research needs to deploy neurophysiological methods to capture the complex emotion construct. Because neurophysiological methods are often applied in experimental settings, an increasing use of these methods would also imply a more advanced discovery of causal effects, thereby better clarifying the role of emotion in the content engagement process.