Emotional news affects social judgments independent of perceived media credibility.

ABSTRACT: How does the credibility we attribute to media sources influence our opinions and judgments derived from news? Participants read headlines about the social behavior of depicted unfamiliar persons from websites of trusted or distrusted well-known German news media. As a consequence, persons paired with negative or positive headlines were judged more negative or positive than persons associated with neutral information independent of source credibility. Likewise, electrophysiological signatures of slow and controlled evaluative brain activity revealed a dominant influence of emotional headline contents regardless of credibility. Modulations of earlier brain responses associated with arousal and reflexive emotional processing show an effect of negative news and suggest that distrusted sources

SUBMITTER: Baum J 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC7943368 | biostudies-literature | 2021 Mar

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature