{"status":"ok","message-type":"work","message-version":"1.0.0","message":{"indexed":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,28]],"date-time":"2026-01-28T20:02:54Z","timestamp":1769630574512,"version":"3.49.0"},"reference-count":52,"publisher":"PeerJ","license":[{"start":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,28]],"date-time":"2026-01-28T00:00:00Z","timestamp":1769558400000},"content-version":"unspecified","delay-in-days":0,"URL":"https:\/\/creativecommons.org\/licenses\/by\/4.0\/"}],"funder":[{"name":"SERICS","award":["PE00000014"],"award-info":[{"award-number":["PE00000014"]}]},{"name":"MUR National Recovery and Resilience Plan by the NextGenerationEU initiative"}],"content-domain":{"domain":[],"crossmark-restriction":false},"short-container-title":[],"abstract":"<jats:p>Emotions shape online discourse and user behavior, yet the emotional interplay between misinformation and toxicity remains understudied. This article analyzes one million comments on Italian YouTube videos to examine how users react to reliable and questionable information, focusing on emotional expression and comment toxicity. Drawing on Plutchik\u2019s psychoevolutionary framework and combining network science with human-centered artificial intelligence (AI), we identify distinct dynamics among users who predominantly engage with misinformation or mainstream sources. Comments on questionable sources convey more fear and less joy, with misinformation-prone users especially prone to expressing fear-tinged anger. We introduce the concept of emotional arborescence\u2014capturing how secondary emotions emerge from basic ones\u2014and find that mainstream-prone users exhibit 25% greater emotional diversity. These findings offer new insights into the emotional dimensions of online misinformation and toxicity, and inform strategies to mitigate their impact on public discourse.<\/jats:p>","DOI":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.3398","type":"journal-article","created":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,28]],"date-time":"2026-01-28T08:11:37Z","timestamp":1769587897000},"page":"e3398","source":"Crossref","is-referenced-by-count":0,"title":["Emotional drivers of misinformation consumption and toxicity on YouTube"],"prefix":"10.7717","volume":"12","author":[{"given":"Arnaldo","family":"Santoro","sequence":"first","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca\u2019 Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy"}]},{"given":"Luciana","family":"Ciringione","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy"}]},{"given":"Massimo","family":"Stella","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, University of Trento, Trento, Italy"}]},{"ORCID":"https:\/\/orcid.org\/0000-0002-0833-5388","authenticated-orcid":true,"given":"Fabiana","family":"Zollo","sequence":"additional","affiliation":[{"name":"Department of Environmental Sciences, Informatics and Statistics, Ca\u2019 Foscari University of Venice, Venice, Italy"},{"name":"The New Institute Center for Environmental Humanities, Venice, Italy"}]}],"member":"4443","published-online":{"date-parts":[[2026,1,28]]},"reference":[{"issue":"1","key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.3398\/ref-1","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"15416","DOI":"10.1038\/s41598-023-42614-z","article-title":"Examining the association between social media fatigue, cognitive ability, narcissism and misinformation sharing: cross-national evidence from eight countries","volume":"13","author":"Ahmed","year":"2023","journal-title":"Scientific Reports"},{"issue":"1","key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.3398\/ref-2","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"2789","DOI":"10.1038\/s41598-024-53124-x","article-title":"Cross-platform social dynamics: an analysis of ChatGPT and COVID-19 vaccine conversations","volume":"14","author":"Alipour","year":"2024","journal-title":"Scientific Reports"},{"issue":"8008","key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.3398\/ref-3","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"582","DOI":"10.1038\/s41586-024-07229-y","article-title":"Persistent interaction patterns across social media platforms and over time","volume":"628","author":"Avalle","year":"2024","journal-title":"Nature"},{"key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.3398\/ref-4","first-page":"403","article-title":"Enhanced smote algorithm for classification of imbalanced big-data using random forest","author":"Bhagat","year":"2015"},{"issue":"2","key":"10.7717\/peerj-cs.3398\/ref-5","doi-asserted-by":"publisher","first-page":"244","DOI":"10.1007\/s42113-022-00136-3","article-title":"When does an individual accept misinformation? 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