The Role of Affect in Agenda Building for Public Relations

Abstract

Grounded in an agenda-building framework, this experiment manipulated two dimensions of affective attributes—valence and arousal—from a corporate blog message to examine their influence on corporate reputation and stakeholder engagement. Overall, the findings showed significant valence effects on reputation and engagement, while arousal effects were only present on corporate reputation. This study adds empirical evidence to the explication of agenda building by focusing on affective attributes and by testing the compelling-arguments hypothesis concerning the role of affective attributes’ (second level) impact on object salience (first level).