Time in hand: Temporal focus in risk discourse and audience emotions on knowledge-sharing platforms

Online knowledge-sharing platforms construct risk knowledge and provide the audience with risk-related scientific facts. We study how speakers organize narratives in past, present, and future foci to influence the audience's emotions through the audience's appraisal of motive congruency and coping potential. Empirical evidence from 210 Technology, Entertainment, Design talks about disasters from 2002 to 2018 demonstrates that emphasizing the past, present, and future in risk narrative leads to the audience's comments with more negative, less positive, and more positive emotions, respectively. Concrete (vs. abstract) portrayal of the risk narrative improves the audience's situational awareness, enhances their risk appraisal, and intensifies the impact of temporal focus on emotions, providing evidence of how temporal focus impacts. These findings demonstrate that temporal focus can effectively reduce risk overreaction or ignorance and facilitate emotion regulation in risk communication.