Images, Emotions, and Credibility: Effect of Emotional Facial Images on Perceptions of News Content Bias and Source Credibility in Social Media

Abstract

Images are an indispensable part of the news content we consume. Highly emotional images from sources of misinformation can greatly influence our judgements. We present two studies on the effects of emotional facial images on users' perception of bias in news content and the credibility of sources. In study 1, we investigate the impact of happy and angry facial images on users' decisions. In study 2, we focus on sources' systematic emotional treatment of specific politicians. Our results show that depending on the political orientation of the source, the cumulative effect of angry facial emotions impacts users' perceived content bias and source credibility. When sources systematically portray specific politicians as angry, users are more likely to find those sources as less credible and their content as more biased. These results highlight how implicit visual propositions manifested by emotions in facial expressions might have a substantial effect on our trust of news content and sources.

Measuring the Effect of Presentational Context and Image Authorship on the Credibility Perceptions of Newsworthy Images

“…Factors like a viewer's internet skills, social media usage and photo editing experience might affect how credible a viewer finds an image presented in a news context (Kasra et al, 2016;Shen et al, 2018). The emotion on the faces of image subjects, as well as the overall positivity of a user's social media presence, also has bearing on how credible viewers judge those images to be (Djafarova & Rushworth, 2017;Karduni et al, 2021).…”