Emotional Resonance and Cultural Narratives in the Spread of Misinformation: A Cross-Lagged Network Analysis of Social Media Texts

Through cross - lagged network analysis of two waves, this study explores the joint influence of emotional resonance and cultural narratives in social media texts. Findings reveal that high - arousal emotions particularly anger and moral outrage, establish strongly - coupled current and future links with misinformation sharing behaviors. These effects are exacerbated by cultural narrative frames, which supply identity boundaries and causal explanations that facilitate collective responses. Specifically, emotional arousal leads to significantly higher sharing propensity and “sharing-without-reading” but gains in accuracy discernment is limited; this suggests an acceleration process at the behavioural level that is faster than at the epistemic level. Robustness and sensitivity checks support the stability of key temporal edges under alternative specifications.