Arousal increases social transmission of information.

Social transmission is everywhere. Friends talk about restaurants , policy wonks rant about legislation, analysts trade stock tips, neighbors gossip, and teens chitchat. Further, such interpersonal communication affects everything from decision making and well-But although it is clear that social transmission is both frequent and important, what drives people to share, and why are some stories and information shared more than others? Traditionally, researchers have argued that rumors spread in the " 3 Cs " —times of conflict, crisis, and catastrophe (e.g., wars or natural disasters; Koenig, 1985)―and the major explanation for this phenomenon has been generalized anxiety (i.e., apprehension about negative outcomes). Such theories can explain why rumors flourish in times of panic, but they are less useful in explaining the prevalence of rumors in positive situations, such as the Cannes Film Festival or the dot-com boom. Further, although recent work on the social sharing of emotion suggests that positive emotion may also increase transmission, why emotions drive sharing and why some emotions boost sharing more than others remains unclear. I suggest that transmission is driven in part by arousal. Physiological arousal is characterized by activation of the autonomic nervous system (Heilman, 1997), and the mobilization provided by this excitatory state may boost sharing. This hypothesis not only suggests why content that evokes more of certain emotions (e.g., disgust) may be shared more than other a review), but also suggests a more precise prediction , namely, that emotions characterized by high arousal, such as anxiety or amusement (Gross & Levenson, 1995), will boost sharing more than emotions characterized by low arousal, such as sadness or contentment. This idea was tested in two experiments. They examined how manipulations that increase general arousal (i.e., watching emotional videos or jogging in place) affect the social transmission of unrelated content (e.g., a neutral news article). If arousal increases transmission, even incidental arousal (i.e., outside the focal content being shared) should spill over and boost sharing. In the first experiment, 93 students completed what they were told were two unrelated studies. The first evoked specific emotions by using film clips validated in prior research (Christie & Friedman, 2004; Gross & Levenson, 1995). Participants in the control condition watched a neutral clip; those in the experimental conditions watched an emotional clip. Emotional arousal and valence were manipulated independently so that high-and low-arousal emotions of both a positive (amusement vs. contentment) and a negative (anxiety vs. …