Understanding publics’ post-crisis social media engagement behaviors: An examination of antecedents and mediators

•Tested uncertainty avoidance and social media usage as antecedents to engagement.•Severity, susceptibility and emotion serially mediated crisis psychological process.•Uncertainty avoidance’s effect on engagement differ by arousal state (high vs. low).•High and low arousal negative emotions have varying engagement activation powers.•Social media usage affected information seeking only through cognitive appraisal. This study examines the psychological mechanisms underlying the process that enables publics’ individual differences (e.g., the levels of uncertainty avoidance and social media usage) to give rise to varying post-crisis social media engagement intentions (e.g., information seeking, support seeking, and negative word-of-mouth). The study confirms that this process is serially mediated by perceived threat severity, perceived susceptibility, and negative emotions. These psychological mediators, however, function differently between uncertainty avoidance and social media usage. For uncertainty avoidance, a high arousal negative emotion (e.g., anger, fear) is a more essential step to influence engagement intentions than a low arousal emotion (e.g., shame, guilt). For social media usage, however, the type of aroused negative emotions does not matter. Rather, the relationship social media usage has with information seeking is different from that with support seeking and negative word-of-mouth intentions. Social media usage induces information seeking intentions only through publics’ cognitive appraisals of the situation without the activation of negative emotions, while it induces supporting seeking and negative word-of-mouth intentions through both cognitive appraisals and negative emotion arousals.