Abstract
<jats:p>This study analyzes how emotions are communicated on social media during crisis events and ex-plores how governments, media, and other communication actors influence public perception through emotional messages. The study helps explain how emotions work in crisis communication and offers ideas for improving online crisis management and public communication. The study addresses the fol-lowing research question: how do governments and media actors use emotional language to shape public opinion and collective response during a crisis? It is based on the assumption that emotional communication strongly affects public trust, group identity, and public attitudes. Methodologically, the research combines crisis lifecycle theory and situational crisis communica-tion theory with qualitative text analysis and simple data visualization. Two crisis cases are compared: the January Events in Kazakhstan (2022) and the Zhengzhou flood in China (2021). Social media data were collected from Instagram and Telegram for the Kazakhstan case and from Weibo and Douyin for the China case using crisis-related keywords. The dataset includes post content, post type, and basic engagement data such as views, likes, and comments from different stages of the crises. The study uses three steps. First, the dataset is built from social media posts. Second, emotions are coded according to Ekman’s six basic categories. Third, emotional patterns and platform dynamics are compared between the two cases. The analysis shows that emotional framing shapes news narratives and audience responses during crises. Emotional communication affects public trust, collective identity, and the emotional tone of online discussions. This cross-disciplinary and comparative approach contributes to a better understanding of emotional communication in crisis contexts by providing empirical evidence from Kazakhstan and China. It also offers practical guidance for government media organizations and public institutions on how to manage emotions more thoughtfully and promote a more rational public communication environment during crisis situations.</jats:p>