Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility

Baum, Julia K.; Rahman, Rasha Abdel

doi:10.1093/scan/nsaa164

Cited by 25 publications

(44 citation statements)

References 66 publications

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“…Our findings are in line with previous literature indicating that neutral face stimuli can be subject to influences from contextual factors ( Anderson et al, 2011 ; Suess et al, 2015 ; Wieser and Moscovitch, 2015 ; Zhao et al, 2017 ; Baum and Abdel Rahman, 2021 ). Moreover, these results add to the literature by showing that negative contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could attribute emotion to neutral faces in a subsequent experiment with ∼12 min of duration and an interval of a few minutes (approximately 5 min) between the experiments.…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

et al. 2022

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Background: Evidence indicates that the processing of facial stimuli may be influenced by incidental factors, and these influences are particularly powerful when facial expressions are ambiguous, such as neutral faces. However, limited research investigated whether emotional contextual information presented in a preceding and unrelated experiment could be pervasively carried over to another experiment to modulate neutral face processing.Objective: The present study aims to investigate whether an emotional text presented in a first experiment could generate negative emotion toward neutral faces in a second experiment unrelated to the previous experiment.Methods: Ninety-nine students (all women) were randomly assigned to read and evaluate a negative text (negative context) or a neutral text (neutral text) in the first experiment. In the subsequent second experiment, the participants performed the following two tasks: (1) an attentional task in which neutral faces were presented as distractors and (2) a task involving the emotional judgment of neutral faces.Results: The results show that compared to the neutral context, in the negative context, the participants rated more faces as negative. No significant result was found in the attentional task.Conclusion: Our study demonstrates that incidental emotional information available in a previous experiment can increase participants’ propensity to interpret neutral faces as more negative when emotional information is directly evaluated. Therefore, the present study adds important evidence to the literature suggesting that our behavior and actions are modulated by previous information in an incidental or low perceived way similar to what occurs in everyday life, thereby modulating our judgments and emotions.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 93%

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

et al. 2022

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“…However, recent research suggests that repeated exposure to a fake news story increases its believability even when a disputed tag is present [ 45 , 46 ]. Furthermore, work by Baum and colleagues [ 14 , 47 ] suggests that trait-relevant information influences person evaluation irrespective of source credibility. For example, when asked to evaluate faces that had been paired with favourable or unfavourable news headlines, participants’ judgements were based on the valence of the headline even when the source was distrusted [ 14 ].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

The influence of fake news on face-trait learning

2022

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Humans spontaneously attribute a wide range of traits to conspecifics based on their facial appearance. Unsurprisingly, previous findings indicate that this ‘person evaluation’ is affected by information provided about the target’s past actions and behaviours. Strikingly, many news items shared on social media sites (e.g., Twitter) describe the actions of individuals who are often shown in accompanying images. This kind of material closely resembles that encountered by participants in previous studies of face-trait learning. We therefore sought to determine whether Twitter posts that pair facial images with favourable and unfavourable biographical information also modulate subsequent trait evaluation of the people depicted. We also assessed whether the effects of this information-valence manipulation were attenuated by the presence of the “disputed tag”, introduced by Twitter as a means to combat the influence of fake-news. Across two preregistered experiments, we found that fictional tweets that paired facial images with details of the person’s positive or negative actions affected the extent to which readers subsequently judged the faces depicted to be trustworthy. When the rating phase followed immediately after the study phase, the presence of the disputed tag attenuated the effect of the behavioural information (Experiment 1: N = 128; Mage = 34.06; 89 female, 36 male, 3 non-binary; 116 White British). However, when the rating phase was conducted after a 10-minute delay, the presence of the disputed tag had no significant effect (Experiment 2: N = 128; Mage = 29.12; 78 female, 44 male, 4 non-binary, 2 prefer not to say; 110 White British). Our findings suggest that disputed tags may have relatively little impact on the long-term face-trait learning that occurs via social media. As such, fake news stories may have considerable potential to shape users’ person evaluation.

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“…The exposure to emotional person-related headlines affects the associated affective value of persons starring the news, influencing social judgments (Baum & Abdel Rahman, 2020). Based on dual-process theories distinguishing fast, reflexive and slower, higher-order cognitive evaluations (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Top Ranked Abstracts from the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Society for Affective Science

2021

Affec Sci

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Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility

Cited by 25 publications

References 66 publications

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

Long-Term Influence of Incidental Emotions on the Emotional Judgment of Neutral Faces

The influence of fake news on face-trait learning

Top Ranked Abstracts from the 2021 Annual Meeting of the Society for Affective Science

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