[Purpose/significance] Online negative emotion is an important factor to promote the outbreak of online public opinion events. And online emotion itself is the emotional response of online users to public opinion events. How⁃ ever, how the characteristics of public opinion events affect the negative emotion intensity and emotion type of individu⁃ als is still lacking of in-depth discussion. [Method/process] Two experiments were conducted to explore the impact of characteristics such as event severity, event responsibility, and event uncertainty on the initial emotion of the audience. [Result/conclusion] The results show that the responsibility and severity of events have a positive impact on the of neg⁃ ative emotion intense, and anger, fear, anxiety and sadness of the audience are prevalent in different situations of public opinion event responsibility and event uncertainty.