People don't read news just to inform themselves, sometimes they do it to regulate their mood

Mar 29, 2006 10:02 GMT  ·  By

News stories are not just informative, they also have a certain emotional content - they can provoke a certain change in the reader's mood. Researchers from the Ohio University have discovered that people sometimes read news precisely for their emotional content, rather than for the information.

Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick and her colleagues did a funny experiment on a set of unsuspicious volunteers (86 students). They had first angered the volunteers and then gave them the opportunity to choose to read various newspaper articles. Some volunteers were placed in the situation when they would have the opportunity to retaliate against the one that had angered them while others were not given such opportunity. (Participants thought they were participating in two unrelated experiments.)

In the first part of the experiment the volunteers were angered in the following way: they were given photos with people's faces and were asked to evaluate the expression represented by each face (they had to select one of the six basic expressions: anger, fear, sadness, disgust, happiness, and surprise). However, all the people in the photos had neutral face expressions. "There was really no way to tell which emotions the people in the photos were feeling," said Knobloch-Westerwick. They were shown 20 photos each for only two seconds.

After this experiment, the supervisor told the participants they got 45 or 85 percent of the answers wrong, and that this reflects either their "fairly weak" or "unusable" social skills. This was designed to provoke either a low level or a high level of anger.

Some of the volunteers were given the opportunity to get back on the supervisor, as they were told that, after the experiments, they would be asked to give their evaluation of the experimenter - and that their evaluation would count in the decision to fire or keep the experimenter.

In the second part of the experiment, the participants saw a contents screen showing 12 stories, all from real magazines. Half were pre-selected as positive stories, and half were negative. The students were told they would not have time to read them all, and to choose the ones that most interested them. Software logged the time that the participants spent reading each article.

Finally, those who were promised the opportunity to evaluate the supervisor were given the chance to do so.

The results:

Men who were given the chance to retaliate choose to read predominantly the negative stories. Women who were given the chance to retaliate choose to read predominantly the positive stories. And, both men and women who were not given the chance to retaliate made a balanced choice of positive and negative articles.

"For women, it is not seen as appropriate for them to retaliate when they're angry, but it is OK for men. And that's reflected in their selection of media content," said Knobloch-Westerwick. "This shows that even our news consumption is not motivated just by information concerns. We use news to regulate our moods. You want to make sure your mood fits whatever situation you're in. Media choices can help you do that."

In other words, men used the news stories in order to maintain their level of anger until they had the opportunity to retaliate, while women used the stories to dissipate their anger, so they wouldn't evaluate the experimenter on emotional basis. This reaction can be seen as a consequence of the man and women stereotypes that present man as being more "rational" than women, a stereotype which is being internalized by women themselves. So, while man didn't think there's anything wrong to evaluate the experimenter on an emotional basis (because supposedly man are rational anyway), women were concerned that their emotion might affect the objectivity of their evaluation.

This shows how the very stereotype of "rational man, irrational women" can lead in practice to the exact opposite outcome: man acting and evaluating things more irrationally than women.

And interestingly, this experiment has shown a perhaps unexpected type of relation people have with news stories: "Our media use is not just for entertainment or information. It can also be functional, helping us to regulate our moods for what we're doing," said Knobloch-Westerwick.

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