Emotional valence is how positive or negative an emotion feels: pleasant at one end, unpleasant at the other. Joy and awe have positive valence; anger, fear and sadness have negative valence. In marketing and communication the same word describes a message, so positive-valence content leaves people feeling good and negative-valence content leaves them feeling bad.
Valence usually comes paired with arousal, which is how activating an emotion is, from calm and sluggish to fired up. Psychologists often place emotions on both axes at once, an idea that goes back to James Russell’s circumplex model of affect (1980): excitement is pleasant and activated, contentment is pleasant and calm, anger is unpleasant and activated, sadness is unpleasant and calm. If you want content shared, the second axis turns out to matter at least as much as the first.
Working on a content platform gives you a front-row seat to a strange lottery: two posts of similar quality go out, one dies quietly, the other takes off. The closest thing I’ve found to an explanation is the emotion a piece of content carries: which way it pulls (its valence, positive, negative or neutral) and how hard it pulls (its arousal).
Positive, negative, neutral#
Positive-valence content makes people feel good: heartwarming stories, dumb memes, uplifting news. It gets shared because passing it on is a small gift, a break from the daily grind. What surprised me more is how well negative valence performs. Anger, anxiety and disgust are powerful sharing engines — people pass along stories about injustice, controversial figures or societal problems to raise awareness, or to rally others to their side. Then there’s neutral content, which doesn’t stir much feeling but earns shares on pure value: a genuinely fascinating fact, a new discovery, a tutorial that solves a real problem.
Arousal is what travels#
The pattern that holds across all of it: the stronger the emotion, the more likely people are to comment, like or share. A mildly pleasant post loses to an infuriating one almost every time. Whether that says anything flattering about us is a separate question.
There’s decent research behind that hunch, and it’s sharper than “stronger is better”. Jonah Berger and Katherine Milkman took nearly 7,000 New York Times articles published over three months and looked at which ones made the paper’s most-emailed list (“What Makes Online Content Viral?”, Journal of Marketing Research, 2012). Positive articles were shared more than negative ones, so valence mattered. But arousal mattered more: articles that evoked high-arousal emotions, positive (awe) or negative (anger, anxiety), were more likely to make the list, and articles that evoked sadness, a low-arousal emotion, were less likely to. That held even after they controlled for how surprising, interesting or useful an article was and how prominently the site featured it, and their experiments pointed the same way.
So what travels isn’t strength of feeling as such; it’s arousal. Sadness can be deeply felt and still not travel, because it’s a deactivating emotion: it makes people slow down rather than do something.
Valence vs arousal, with examples#
| High arousal | Low arousal | |
|---|---|---|
| Positive valence | Awe, excitement, amusement: a jaw-dropping discovery, a meme that makes you laugh out loud, an underdog win | Contentment, calm, relief: a cosy routine video, a gentle how-to, a pretty photo |
| Negative valence | Anger, anxiety, outrage: an injustice story, a scam warning, a heated debate | Sadness, boredom, disappointment: a sombre obituary, a bleak trend piece |
If Berger and Milkman are right, most shares come from the high-arousal column, and the low-arousal negative corner is where posts quietly go to die.
What tends to take off#
A few kinds of content start with an advantage. Debatable ideas, because people share to agree or to object, and polarising topics gain traction fast. Humour that leans on shared experience — the inside joke a whole community gets at once. Human-interest stories about ordinary people getting through hard things. Anything riding a trending topic with a genuinely fresh angle rather than a reheated take. And interactive formats — quizzes, polls, challenges — because participating is already halfway to sharing.
None of this adds up to a formula, and I’m suspicious of anyone selling one. But if I had to bet on a single variable, it’s this: content that fires people up, one way or the other, beats content that leaves them calm, week after week.