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Media literacy has been gaining traction as a part of higher education curricula to support learning as educational institutions are recognizing the importance of developing students’ media literacy skills. However, students’ emotional reactions towards media literacy can be vastly different and, in turn, may impact their perception of truth and credibility of mixed media messages. In this study, we explored 68 non-health professions university students’ unique emotional profiles towards media literacy. We further examined whether students with different emotional profiles would differ in their credibility ratings (truthfulness, trustworthiness, and believability) of media messages that were drawn from mainstream and fake news sources. We also investigated the relationship between emotion profiles and emotional reactions towards mainstream versus fake news messages. We employed a probabilistic, latent clustering approach, latent profiling analysis (LPA), to generate latent categories of emotion profiles. LPA revealed four distinct emotion profiles that students endorsed: (1) low emotions, (2) moderate emotions, (3) high negative emotions, and (4) high positive emotions towards learning media literacy. Additional findings revealed that students with a low emotional profile tended to rate all media messages as more truthful, trustworthy, and believable than other emotion groups. Moreover, we identified that students in the moderate emotions and high negative emotions group rated fake messages with more positive emotions. This study offers insight towards the significance of understanding how emotions towards media literacy can impact the outcomes of media perception. This is an important step that will encourage educators to develop more engaging media literacy instruction and interventions.
