Psychophysiological and Memory Effects of Negative Political ADS: Aversive, Arousing, and Well Remembered

Processing Central and Peripheral Detail: How Content Arousal and Emotional Tone Influence Encoding

“…As the event rises to a moderate level of intensity (threat is present but not imminent), a relatively high level of cognitive resources are allocated to encoding the threatening stimulus (external attention) in order to monitor and identify the danger. This is consistent with a body of media research suggesting privileged processing for moderately arousing negative messages (S. D. Bradley, Angelini, & Lee, 2007;Grabe, Lang, Zhou, & Bolls, 2000;A. Lang, Newhagen, & Reeves, 1996).…”

“…At low and high levels of intensity, encoding performance is predicted to be poor while at moderate intensity it is predicted to be quite good. Support for this pattern of relationship for peripheral detail encoding already exists in, for example, the Easterbrook claim that attention narrows during traumatic events and in studies demonstrating vivid memory for moderately arousing negative messages (e.g., S. D. Bradley et al, 2007;Burke et al, 1992;Grabe et al, 2000). Thus:…”

Incivility in political advertisements: a look at the 2012 US presidential election

“…However, such delineation is not without its critics, and it should come as no surprise to informed observers that similar behaviour in other contexts would not be tolerated. If this issue is revisited, the moniker 'negative' for political advertisements and the solid body of research in this field should play a pivotal role (consider, for example, the innovative method used by Bradley, Angelini, and Lee 2007). Our hope is that this study will broaden any such discussion by adding several new categories underlying what we mean by negativity, as well as the civility/incivility distinction.…”

Transmission creep

“…Scholars have identified responses to negative political advertising (Bradley, Angelini, and Lee 2007), HIV/AIDS public service announcements (Zhang et al 2015), and entertainment programming (Rubenking and Lang 2014), among other stimuli. Here, too, there has been little pick-up among scholars focused on journalists or journalism, again with some exceptions (see Lynch and McGoldrick 2015;Soroka and McAdams 2015).…”