Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news.

ABSTRACT: What accounts for the prevalence of negative news content? One answer may lie in the tendency for humans to react more strongly to negative than positive information. "Negativity biases" in human cognition and behavior are well documented, but existing research is based on small Anglo-American samples and stimuli that are only tangentially related to our political world. This work accordingly reports results from a 17-country, 6-continent experimental study examining psychophysiological reactions to real video news content. Results offer the most comprehensive cross-national demonstration of negativity biases to date, but they also serve to highlight considerable individual-level variation in responsiveness to news content. Insofar as our results make clear the pervasiveness of negativity

SUBMITTER: Soroka S 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6754543 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Sep

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature