Perspective Change in a Time of Crisis

By the end of January 2020, the World Health Organization had declared the COVID-19 pandemic a global health emergency. This chapter presents a rationale for producing messages that promote critical reflection through discrete emotion, focusing on surprise. It presents two message experiments conducted at different timepoints during the COVID-19 pandemic. These experiments illustrate message features that generate surprise, the surprise-critical reflection process, the outcomes of critical reflection, and the effect of information overload and perceived COVID-19 exaggeration on the hypothesized relationships. In a crisis media environment, messages must be designed to cut through message overload and contradictory messages in order to encourage and promote critical reflection. Critical reflection may also support the epistemology of critical communication research and theory. Future research should build on the arguments to form a greater theoretical understanding of critical reflection related to communication. © 2021 John Wiley and Sons Inc.