The Role of Epistemic Emotions During Engagement with Online Information Encounters

Abstract

This exploratory case study aimed to understand to what extent epistemic emotions are connected to effortful engagement when young adults were incidentally exposed to textual information snippets on a simulated social media timeline. Using discourse analysis, we draw on think-aloud data from fifteen young adults, to identify participants' emotional reactions to different textual snippets and to examine when these might prompt effortful engagement, as indicated by reliance on epistemic beliefs, source evaluation, evidence evaluation or science literacy. Our findings provide two important insights. We found that during online information encounters, frustration, curiosity and confusion were co-occurring with effortful engagement and were triggered, in particular, by posts that included negative words. We also found that epistemic engagement occurred even when boredom was verbalized first and was followed by frustration or confusion. We discuss the implications of this work for informal and formal learning environments.