News Expectancy Violations and Emotions

News audiences expect trusted sources to provide news that supports their worldviews. However, trusted news sources can truthfully publish news that actually contradicts their usual (expected) slant. Subsequently, such expectancy violations can affect the believability of news and whether audience members want to further expose themselves to that news or prefer to avoid it. This chapter emphasizes that news exposure and avoidance need to be studied by dissecting the intricate interplay between news source trust and news content. An analysis of distinct literature on expectancy violations and surprise, which are rarely cross-referenced, although they explore similar mechanisms, demonstrates that much research in those areas has focused on cognitive responses but could benefit from integrating emotional responses to better understand media bias perceptions. That allows researchers to better investigate key emotional aspects of expectancy violations in the context of their consequences for news exposure and avoidance in the future.