Gender-specific emotional characteristics of crisis communication on social media: Case studies of two public health crises

Understanding the effects of gender-specific emotional responses on information sharing behaviors are of great importance for swift, clear, and accurate public health crisis communication, but remains underexplored. This study fills this gap by investigating gender-specific anxiety- and anger-related emotional responses and their effects on the virality of crisis information by creatively drawing on social role theory, integrated crisis communication modeling, and text mining. The theoretical model is tested using two datasets (Changsheng vaccine crisis with 2,423,074 textual data and COVID-19 pandemic with 893,930 textual data) collected from Weibo, a leading social media platform in China. Females express significantly high anxiety and anger levels (p value<0.001) during the Changsheng fake vaccine crisis, while express significantly higher levels of anxiety during COVID-19 than males (p value<0.001), but not anger (p value=0.13). Regression analysis suggests that the virality of crisis information is significantly strengthened when the level of anger in posts of males is high or the level of anxiety in posts of females is high for both crises. However, such gender-specific virality differences of anger/anxiety expressions are violated once females have large numbers of followers (influencers). Furthermore, the gender-specific emotional effects on crisis information are more significantly enhanced for male influencers than female influencers. This study contributes to the literature on gender-specific emotional characteristics of crisis communication on social media and provides implications for practice.