Influence of Severity and Susceptibility Information Content on Users' Psychological Response in Emergencies — the Moderating Effect of Regulatory Focus

To examine the influence of information content on users’ psychological responses in sudden disasters, we constructed a novel cognitive and emotional response model based on the heuristic–systematic model (HSM) and regulatory focus theory. The multiple moderated regression is tested using 55,720 pieces of public opinion data related to the ‘Jiuzhaigou earthquake’ from 8 August 2017 to 23 August 2017, collected from Microblog. The results show that users’ primary cognitive response is greatly affected by susceptibility to information content, while the secondary cognitive response is more vulnerable to severity. Further, susceptibility has a greater effect than severity on users’ positive and negative emotional responses. Severity and susceptibility have less influence on the cognitive response of promotion-focus users than they do on prevention-focus users. The findings have important practical implications for emergency management departments on how to guide users in emergencies.