Motivation and emotion/Book/2024/News and emotion

News and emotion:
What role does emotion play in the presentation and consumption of news?

Overview

On the fateful day of 15 April 2013, tragedy struck in Boston. As hundreds of marathon runners crossed the finish line, 2 bombs exploded killing 3 people and injuring hundreds more. A study of mental health conducted by Holman and colleagues at the University of California confirmed the expected- that those who had witnessed the event (see Figure 1) had suffered a decline in their mental health. However, another group had been even more badly shaken: Those who did not witness the explosion firsthand, but had consumed 6 or more hours of news coverage per day in the week afterwards. Curiously, having been in the vicinity during the bombing or knowing someone who was injured or died in it were not as predictive of high acute stress than the nature of one’s news consumption habits during this terrible time (Gorvett, 2020).

Figure 1. Spectators helping victims at the 2013 Boston marathon bombings.

News is a significant part of everyday life. It has many functions and is evolving. Emotion of both the journalist and the audience create a feedback cycle where bias is almost unavoidable and shapes the presentation of news. Consumption of news is driven by someone's understanding of and emotions about the topic, the perceived negativity and threat level and their personal connection to it. The resulting consumption habits help to determine what sells and what doesn't. This calls into question journalistic integrity. The reach and power of news in it's current state suggest a crisis of a depressed and dependent population, and an increase in the spread of misinformation is responsible for vast negative outcomes.

Focus questions

What factors determine the way news is presented and the effect it has on our emotions?
What is the relationship between news and emotion? How does one affect the other?
How can this relationship be harnessed for effective, accurate communication of information?

What is news?

Every day people are faced with various events, ideas and processes, many of which clash with one another. News monitors and interprets these concepts, conveying them to the population. The earliest news was delivered by word of mouth. Merchants, sailors and travellers brought news to the mainland upon their return. Pedlars spread this information across towns and ancient scribes recorded it. The invention of the printing press revolutionized the transmission and reliability of news. Newspapers were the primary journalistic medium of the 18^th and 19^th century (see Figure 2), followed by radio and television in the 20^th (Reese, 2016).The definition of “news” is becoming looser with time, being that it is strategically or even unconsciously embedded into our everyday lives in ways we may not otherwise consider (like advertising) but consistently demonstrate reach and impact (Sivek, 2018).

Figure 2. Young girl reading newspaper article on moon landing, 1969.

Why do we consume news?


Reason	Example
Staying informed: To learn about current events and what is happening in the world.	During the height of the covid-19 pandemic, many people relied on the news to keep them updated on case numbers, vaccine availability, testing site locations and rules about mask wearing and isolation periods.
Education: To gain knowledge and understanding of different topics.	Consuming a news segment about an endangered animal will likely make someone more educated about and aware of the animal and nature of their endangerment.
Entertainment: Some news stories are interesting or entertaining.	This story about a seal playfully destroying a town's traffic cones each year (Moench, 2023).
Perspective: To see different viewpoints and opinions.	Someone who is unsure who to vote for can access a variety of different information and outlooks through the news to inform their judgment.

(Reach Out, n.d)

The impact of news

News is very powerful and prevalent. It shapes understanding of people, places and events, and therefore:

Determines people's attitudes and opinions.
Can change the content of people's dreams.
Can lead to miscalculated risks and misinformed decisions, whether at an individual or governmental level.
Increases one’s risk of developing PTSD, depression and anxiety disorders, mostly due to repeated exposure to negative and traumatizing stories.
Increases one’s risk of having a heart attack or developing health conditions later in life.
Contributes to societal divide and pressures such as classism and Racism.
Poses personal and global financial and economic risks.

(Global Affairs Explained, n.d.)

Journalism

Competition is intense in the news world right now. Rivals are everywhere, endless and in disguise. Information and diverse modalities of accessing it are more available than ever before, and journalists have a much smaller chance of capturing audience attention, or even having their news stories seen at all. A tried, tested and common method of effectively doing this is by appealing to audience emotion, which concerningly blurs the lines of integrity and manipulates consumption habits and rates. Accurate, reliable news sources are not fulfilling their potential.

Objectivity vs. emotion

News companies/journalists may believe a certain narrative is interesting, engaging and important but be restricted in their presentation of it due to practical pressures, limited resources and deadlines. They need to turn complex real events into formulaic, understandable, accessible and consumable items of media. A traditional and integral principal of journalism is the idea that it presents an account that is balanced, fact-checked, including context and not including the distortion of a journalists feelings.

Figure 3. The news cycle of "sensitive" content creation.

However, journalists are not immune to the impact of news, and have different factors shaping their worldview and their understanding of particular circumstances, the same way every human does. It is almost impossible to have no bias in a piece. Seemingly small details in the way news is presented- like which parts of the story are included and excluded out of a large amount of information and footage- indicate subjectivity, even when two sides of a story are acknowledged (Beckett, 2015). As such, emotion has always been at the core of the way a journalist presents news to an audience, the reception of the audience and the way this feedback informs the presentation of the news segments that follow.

This is represented in the news cycle of "sensitive" content creation (see Figure 3). The journalist inevitably creates an affective narrative following their professional process in interpreting the event. They then learn what the audience responds to, which tends to be the more emotional, flashy news portrayals. The audience shares the news more when they feel emotionally driven to. This feedback is adopted and used to appeal to the audience. Emotional stories are making people emotional, and emotional people are (invertedly) making emotional stories- by their consumption indicating the value to the news provider of emotion in both the portrayal and reception of the news they shared (Beckett, 2015).

This is demonstrated originally by yellow journalism. This term emerged in the 1980s when 2 New York-based newspapers were battling for the top spot. It is characterized by the tactical use of exaggerated headlines, unverified claims, partisan agendas, and a focus on topics like crime, scandal, sports, and violence It is associated with exaggerating facts and spreading rumours, and yet produces results in favour of the news source (Kennedy, 2019). The push towards emotionally charged news combined with the increasingly difficult economic and attentional demand to fulfill may entice and ultimately influence journalists to compromise objectivity and integrity.

Ethics

Content distributed on social media platforms already faces unique challenges within itself- as these platforms accept very little responsibility for what takes place on them. Twitter, now known as X, has faced controversy for years over the showing of hateful and violent content. Their responses have been largely slow, inadequate and in the interest of corporate success rather than morality. After allowing racist and homophobic rhetoric and visually distressing depictions of gore for many years, X has only recently enacted stricter policies regarding hateful speech and imagery. Prior to this, many users have reported seeing content intending to incite violence, even without seeking it out. When shown to someone experiencing strong emotions in and emotional way, this has been successful. Journalists are additionally faced with increased efforts and decreased motivations to align with their ethical standards when it is socially acceptable, easier and more monetarily beneficial to stoop to level of misinformation and unnecessarily triggering negative emotions for more audience engagement (Sivek, 2018).

Test yourself!

A big shift in the format of news

According to recent research conducted by the Australian Communications and Media Authority (2024), Australians are going to fewer sources to access news. In 2023, Australians used on average 3.1 different sources of news, down from 3.5 in 2022. It also found that more Australians are choosing social media as their primary source of news content. 20% of Australians nominated social media as their main source of news in 2023, up from 17% in 2022.

Social media & technology

The increasing take-over of social media and modern technology mean the modern metric for news consumption are ”shares" and "likes", which rely heavily on audience approval and engagement, factors that are determined almost entirely by their emotions. This adaptation has created a shift from more formal reporting to the utilization of humor, convenience, relatability, popular figures and trends in media.

Biases

Since social media is arguably a representation of oneself- via personalised profiles and the messages one chooses to project on them- people share the things that they believe are the “right answer” (participation bias) (Elston, 2021) or make them look better (social desirability bias) (Nikolopoulou, 2022), which is not necessarily "the truth". Further, people may feel more driven to gain approval from others now than ever before due to lack of self-esteem or positive emotions induced by the increasingly hopeless and negative state of the world that the news paints a picture of. Confirmation bias (Simkus, 2023) is reinforced by the algorithms that monitor online activity by feeding users more and more of what they seem to like, regardless of the morality and validity of the information that's presented.

Misinformation and "the algorithm"

Online dialogue is more about affirming one’s own perspective than seeking accurate information. This puts people at risk of getting stuck in echo chambers projecting only more and more extreme versions of the things they "like" and connecting them to similar others who will reinforce the ideas during their interactions. The news one receives via devices, advertising and social media is delivered to them based on their emotions, and is designed to achieve higher user satisfaction and therefore higher user engagement. This means the more content one consumes presenting a particular ideology, the more they will be fed that content, causing them to thus grow deeper beliefs about and emotional connection to the idea and creating a dangerous cycle that can easily perpetuate misinformation (Beckett & Deuze, 2016).

News that makes someone feel good, and therefore more driven to share it, may not necessarily be reliable facts. People generally are less receptive to information that challenges their beliefs. As data scientist Gilad Lotan wrote (2014): “The better we get at modeling user preferences, the more accurately we construct recommendation engines that fully capture user attention. In a way, we are building personalized propaganda engines that feed users content which makes them feel good and throws away the uncomfortable bits."

Relationships between emotion and news consumption

There is a causal effect of negative and emotional words on news consumption.
Negativity in news increases physiological arousal and, as such, is more likely to be remembered by users.
Emotions are suggested to differentially impact judgement and perception, particularly of fake political news.

Negativity presented in news increases consumption

A study examining 105,000 different variations of news stories from "Upworthy.com" (that generated 5.7million clicks amongst 370 million overall impressions) found that even though positive words were slightly more prevalent than negative words, negative words in news headlines increased consumption rates (and positive words decreased consumption rates). For a headline of average length, each additional negative word increased the click-through rate by 2.3%. The effect of "fear" was significantly related to article consumption due to it creating a more memorable full-body response (Robertson et al., 2023). For example, news telling someone they may be in danger of contracting a virus will stimulate their awareness, monitoring and thus consumption of related news. Where a threat is perceived, more attention is drawn. Which can lead news stories to imply a threat to an audience when there may not rationally be one.

A longitudinal analysis conducted by Roazdo et al identified similar mechanisms. 23 million headlines from 47 popular news media outlets in the United States between 2000 and 2019 were processed using a Transformer language model. This model was designed to detect sentiment as positive or negative and to automatically categorise headlines according to Ekman’s 6 basic emotions- anger, disgust, fear, joy, sadness and surprise- with an additional category of “neutral”. Results showed an increase of negative sentiment in headlines over time. A higher proportion of headlines represented anger, fear, disgust and sadness, while headlines considered neutral were shown to be reducing in frequency. Headlines denoting anger were, on average, more prevalent in right-leaning news companies and stories than left-leaning (Rozado et al., 2020). Which confirms the dangerous political outcomes that can occur through the emotionality of a reader and the manipulation of emotion by a news outlet, especially when they have an agenda. Emotion clearly plays a very powerful role in today’s political climate.

Emotional states predict belief in fake news

In 1994, Bodenhausen et al discovered that anger elicits greater reliance on heuristic cues in a persuasion paradigm, whereas sadness promotes a decreased reliance. Literature on the relationship between emotion and gullibility generally observes that a negative mood can increases skepticism, whereas a positive mood increases gullibility and the ability to identity deception.

Within the realm of political fake news, anger is believed to promote politically-aligned motivated belief in misinformation, and anxiety is seen to increase belief in politically incongruous fake news due to increased feelings of doubt that cloud their perception. For instance, faith in institution (such as the government or church) and one's general confidence (including when unwarranted and incorrect) in their information processing capacity are associated with belief in information and conspiracy theories that contradict scientific research. Anger and anxiety prime belief in and responses to news, especially when someone feels passionately about the’ topic as typically seen in politics (Martel et al, 2020). People don’t want to accept that the government, their religion or their own knowledge and analytic capacities are unfaithful, and this is something that can be easily harnessed or exploited in pushing a narrative.

A study released in 2020 utilized the PANSS (positive and negative syndrome scale)- a self-report medical resource used in the assessment of schizophrenia. For nearly every emotion evaluated on the scale, an increase correlated to an increase in belief in fake news. Furthermore, almost every emotion was found to have a significant interaction with the type of news headline in that greater emotionality also predicts decreased discernment between real and fake news. The only emotions that didn't produce significance for the context were "interested, alert, determined and attentive" which reflect the notion that emotions related more to analytic thinking than emotionality play an important role in critical evaluation of the validity of news presented, and consequently being able to correctly identify fake news (Martel et al., 2020).

Delving deeper into emotions and decision making, people use an “affect heuristic” to form preferences. People are automatically cognitively tasked with placing information into an affective frame of reference that combines emotion with facts in order to form preferences. The shaping of decisions through emotion operates in an interval so brief that it is possible for the person to have no recognition or recall of the stimulus- a time frame as short as 1/250^th of a second while scrolling is all it takes for one to have an emotional reaction or opinion. Representations of emotion may only be subliminal perceived, yet still affect an audience’s evaluation of the information. With the epidemic of provocative content, it is easy to be conditioned even by unconscious psychological processes to believe events went a different way than reality. Someone’s individual affect heuristic can be activated by emotion so easily that their analytical capacity can’t keep up (Sivek, 2018). Emotion consequently plays a facilitative role in the number of “informed citizens” in society- a number that must not fall too low for society to continue to function (Bas & Grabe, 2015).

Test yourself!

Conclusion

It is evident that emotion plays a crucial role in the presentation and consumption of news. Due to the evolving climate of technology, news and competition, reader attention is a limited resource and more extreme, tactical lengths are being gone to in order to capture it. Negativity and fear attract consumption: Feedback journalists use to inform their future pieces. Higher emotionality and faith in institution mean less analytical thinking and higher susceptibility to believing fake news: Which in itself is a factor driving further misinformation due to the workings of algorithms. Emotional news tends to gain more traction, particularly when it has a negative sentiment and invokes anger and fear.

The future of news is bleak: Integrity will be fighting with more and more advanced and extreme versions of yellow journaling, and society will be filled with less informed citizens if the trends continue, potentially having huge political and economic effects. More regulations around news platforms and news sharing need to be established. News programs about misinformation should be shown more often and can be strategically appealing to the emotion of the audience by listing the shocking potential global outcomes of fake news and the utility of critical thinking. Media companies should be required to state their sources and admit that they cannot guarantee 100% factual basis. Workshops in schools and on social media before you can access the app or pass the subject on identifying falsehoods and using analytical tools when processing information could be helpful, as well as increasing practices of mindfulness to avoid incorrect subliminal ideas being formed by becoming more aware (Sivek, 2018).

"For most folks, no news is good news; for the press, good news is not news" - Gloria Borger, 1952.

References

Australin Communications and Media Authority. (2024, February 21) ACMA research reveals Australian news consumption trends. Australian Government. https://www.acma.gov.au/articles/2024-02/acma-research-reveals-australian-news-consumption-trends

Bas, O., & Grabe, M. E. (2015). Emotion-Provoking Personalization of News: Informing Citizens and Closing the Knowledge Gap? Communication Research, 42(2), 159-185. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650213514602

Beckett, C. (2015, September 10). How journalism is turning emotional and what that might mean for news. The London School Of Economics And Political Science. https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/polis/2015/09/10/how-journalism-is-turning-emotional-and-what-that-might-mean-for-news/

Beckett, C., & Deuze, M. (2016). On the Role of Emotion in the Future of Journalism. Social Media + Society, 2(3). https://doi.org/10.1177/2056305116662395

Elston, D. M. (2021). Participation bias, self-selection bias, and response bias. Journal of the American Academy of Dermatology. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jaad.2021.06.025

Global Affairs Explained. (n.d.). 6 Reasons Why The News Is Important. Retrieved August 20, 2024, from https://globalaffairsexplained.com/why-news-important/

Gorvett, Z. (2020, May 13). How the news changes the way we think and behave. BBC. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200512-how-the-news-changes-the-way-we-think-and-behave

Ingram, D., & Henshall, P. (2008). What is news? Famous quotes on journalism. The News Manual. https://thenewsmanual.net/Resources/what_is_news_00.htm

Kennedy, L. (2019, August 22). Did Yellow Journalism Fuel the Outbreak of the Spanish American War. History. https://www.history.com/news/spanish-american-war-yellow-journalism-hearst-pulitzer

Lotan, G. (2014, August 4). Israel, Gaza, War & Data – The Art of Personalizing Propaganda. Global Voices. https://globalvoices.org/2014/08/04/israel-gaza-war-data-the-art-of-personalizing-propaganda/

Martel, C., Pennycook, G. & Rand, D. G. (2020). Reliance on emotion promotes belief in fake news. Cognitive Research: Principles and Implications, 5(47). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41235-020-00252-3

Moench, M. (2023. December 22). The Internet’s Newest Sensation is Neil the Seal From Tasmania. Time. https://time.com/6550164/neil-the-seal-tasmania-background-instagram-tiktok/

Nikolopoulou (2022, June 24). What is Social Desirability Bias: Definition & Examples. Scribbr. https://www.scribbr.com/research-bias/social-desirability-bias/

Reach Out. (n.d.). The news and critical thinking: Why is it important? Retrieved August 20, 2024, from https://au.reachout.com/challenges-and-coping/the-big-issues/the-news-and-critical-thinking-why-is-it-important

Reese, S. (2016). Theories of Journalism. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228613.013.83

Robertson, C. E., Pröllochs, N., Schwarzenegger, K., et al. (2023). Negativity drives online news consumption. Nature Human Behaviour, 7, 812-822. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01538-4

Rozado, D., Hughes, R. & Halberstadt, J. (2022). Longitudinal analysis of sentiment and emotion in news media headlines using automated labelling with Transformer language models. Plos One,17(10). https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0276367

Simkus, J. (2023, June 22). Confirmation Bias In Psychology: Definition & Examples. Simply Psychology. https://www.simplypsychology.org/confirmation-bias.html

Sivek, S. C. (2018). Both Facts and Feelings: Emotion and News Literacy. Journal of Media Literacy Education, 10(2), 123 – 138. https://doi.org/10.1177/0093650213514602

External links

ACMA research reveals Australian news consumption trends (Australian Communications and Media Authority)
How journalism is turning emotional and what that might mean for news (The London School of Economics and Political Science)
How the news changes the way we think and behave (BBC)
Israel, Gaza, war and data: The art of personalisng propaganda (Global voices)
The news and critical thinking: Why is it important? (Reach Out)
What is news? Famous quotes on journalism (The News Manual)
6 reasons why the news is important (Global Affairs Explained)