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Emotions and Information Processing

Tania Gosselin and Allison Harell

Université du Québec à Montréal

Abstract: In an experimental study, we manipulate news content about violence to explore

the effects of emotions on information processing and learning. We investigate whether

our conditions generate distinct patterns of physiological reactions, and if information

attention and retention vary as a function of emotional response. We find some indications

that news content about violence (especially gendered) induced a specific pattern of arousal

(but not attentiveness) in respondents compared to exposure to neutral, mildly positive

news content acting as a control condition. We also find that physiological reactions

(arousal) correspond to expected patterns of information seeking, but not learning.

Note: This paper was prepared for presentation at the Annual Conference of the European

Consortium for Political Research in Montreal, Quebec, August 27-29, 2015. The

authors would like to thank the Canadian Foundation for Innovation whose generous

funding made possible the infrastructure used to collect the data presented here.

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Introduction

Recent developments in political psychology highlight the strong connection between

emotions and reason in the realm of politics. Notably, Marcus, Neuman and McKuen’s

affective intelligence theory (2000) claims that people rarely pay attention to politics,

unless something unusual catches their attention. However, when a threat is perceived or a

new development draws attention, anxiety triggers a process of information collection that

involves cognition.

While the effect of emotions on political behaviour is still hotly debated (see Groenendyk

2011 and Brader 2011 for reviews), recent empirical findings tend to support the theory.

For example, Brader (2005, 2006) explores the effects of emotionally-charged images and

music in political advertisement and finds that those who have viewed ads that induce

anxiety were more likely to seek out and recall information. Huddy et al. (2007) also find

that anxiety increased attention to the issue of the Iraq war in conversation, along with a

moderate increase in the use of information. Other experimental studies conclude there is

a link between anxiety and information seeking (Valentino et al. 2008, Hutchings et al.

2006, Redlawsk, Civettini, and Lau 2007), as well as learning (Hutchings et al. 2006).

Few studies in politics have so far relied on physiological data to investigate the impact of

emotions. Such data not only permits collecting information in addition to self-reports

about emotional states, it also allows bridging the emotions in politics literature with works

on the physiological impact of media content. Given the latter is a key source of political

news for citizens, combining the political and psychological approaches has a strong

potential to enhance our understanding of media effects and emotions.

We explore the effects of emotions on information processing and political knowledge by

experimentally manipulating news content. We explore three main questions. First, we

verify whether self reports of discrete emotions match with physiological reactions;

second, we explore if attention to information and information seeking varies as a function

of physiological emotional reactions ; and finally, check whether information retention is

affected by emotional response (as measured by physiological arousal).

We find that news content about violence (whether gendered or not) did not induce greater

levels of arousal and attentiveness in respondents compared to exposure to neutral, mildly

positive news content acting as a control condition. This was not in line with self-reports

collected in a prior pilot experiment. However, we find that physiological reactions

(arousal) correspond to expected patterns of information seeking.

Emotion and Information Processing

Politicians and the media have long appealed to emotions to capture attention and influence

opinions (Graber 2007). In political science, political psychologist and students of

heuristics have explored the role of emotions in voting behaviour (e.g. Brody and

Sniderman 1985; Conover and Feldman 1986). With “symbolic politics”, Sears and his

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colleagues (Sears 1993; Sears, Hensler and Speer 1979; Sears et al. 1980) had already

questioned the self-interested and rational nature of political attitudes and behaviour,

explaining them instead with childhood socialization reanimated by the use of symbols on

the contemporary political scene.

Marcus and his colleagues (2000) also contend that in normal circumstances, citizens’

judgment and decisions are based on predispositions. However, they propose that the

mechanism behind the impact of emotions works through directing attention to politics and

the subsequent mobilization of cognitive resources. Feelings of anxiety incite citizens to

seek information, setting in motion a reasoned process through which opinions and

behaviour are adjusted to the situation or event responsible for the initial upsurge of

anxiety.

In the last decade, affective intelligence theory has generated studies that provide empirical

measurement of the impact of the emotions generated by media content and elite discourse,

notably on information seeking and recall. Brader (2005) finds that people who viewed

political advertisement with music and images charged with emotions were more likely to

indicate their interest in receiving more information about a wider range of issues related

to the ad than those who had seen the same ad without its emotional content. Valentino et

al. (2008) exposed Democrat-leaning participants to mock newspaper articles depicting

either the likelihood of a Republican candidate’s victory as very high and having

detrimental consequences for society (high threat condition) or the victory of the

Democratic candidate as more likely, with positive consequences (low threat condition).

Those exposed to the high threat article reported more anxiety and, as a result, consulted

on average more articles than the participants in the low threat condition. They were also

better able to answer questions directly pertaining to the content of the articles they had

viewed during their search for information about issues and candidates. Coan, Merolla and

Zeichmester (2012) also found that people who reported fear after reading a mock news

article (treatments which conveyed negative information) were more likely to seek

information about terrorism and the economy.

The evidence is more mixed with respect to the impact of anxiety on learning. Studies

focusing on electoral politics and candidates tend to find a positive relationship between

emotions and learning (although see Redlawsk and colleagues 2007, 2009). Indeed,

Marcus, Neuman, and MacKuen (2000) find a correlation between anxiety and interest in

politics, intention to seek out new information, as well as knowledge about candidates’

position. Hutchings, Valentino, Philpot, and White (2006) also find that anxiety boosts

learning about politics. Brader (2005) finds that recall of issues raised in the political ads

was higher in the anxiety condition (with evocative music and images).

The picture is less clear when anxiety is related to issues such as war and terrorism, which

are topics that are frequently used to manipulate perceptions of threats and feelings in

surveys and experimental contexts. Huddy and her colleagues (2007) find that anxiety

increased attention to the issue of the Iraq war in conversation, along with a moderate

increase in the use of information. Yet, in another study (2005) they show that women are

more likely to report anxiety concerning terrorism in the US, and that anxiety is negatively

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associated with knowledge about terrorism-related questions. Overall, it seems that the

information seeking part of the affective intelligence theory has received more solid

support than the learning part.

There are two types of research in media psychology regarding emotions: the first focuses

on ‘primary’ emotions (Lee and Lang 2009, 149) such as anger fear, etc. (Affective

Intelligence Theory is closer to that first type). The other type of studies contends that

emotions are defined by two dimensions, valence (direction) and intensity (arousal).

Underlying these two dimensions are the approach and the avoidance motivations (re work

of Cacciopo). Attempting to mix primary and dimensional types of studies, Lee and Lang

(2009) find that joy and fear elicit approach and aversion respectively, while anger showed

activation on both dimensions. Sadness corresponded only weakly with avoidance. Our

analysis also aims at contributing to knowledge by bridging the two mains approaches.

When we are exposed to the media, its emotional content and the emotional response it

generates co exist (Lang and Ewoldsen 2012). In this study, we deal primarily with the

emotional response to threatening or anxiety-inducing content rather than positive or

negative features of media content. Of course, media content typically elicits more than a

single emotion at a time. Anger and fear are often reported together in psychological study

(Lang and Awoldsen 2012).

The Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing (LC4MP, Lang

2006, 2009) posits that cognitive resources are allocated to processing ‘motivationaly

relevant content’ (Rubenking and Lang 2014, 547) such as novel elements, or emotional

ones, increasing the probability that a participant will recall information. Conversely, the

Defense Cascade Model, is centered on threat and reaction to it. Not unlike AI theory, it

predicts that aversion to the threat will stimulate information intake – but when aversion is

too high, the threat has to be faced with action rather than information gathering, causing

memory to fail. Lang, Park, Sanders-Jackson and Wilson (2007) found that high arousal

and negativity led to poorer information retaining, while less arousing but negative

messages were better remembered. Messages with fear or disgust imagery were more easily

recognized that those that had both components (Leshner, Bolls and Thomas 2009).

What causes the emotion may well also impact on information processing; for example,

disgust elicited by immoral injustices in media content will capture attention, and involve

slower, more cognitive processing than disgust elicited by gross-out scenes (Rubeking and

Lang 2014). The former were also likely to generate longer lasting emotions (Simpson et

al 2006). That means that our domestic violence condition, which has a component of

moral injustice, might elicit anger and if it does so, the heart rate may not decelerate as

much as when fear only is involved. Fear - leading to coping by looking at more neutral

articles.

Based on past studies then, our project seeks to explore three inter-related questions :

1) Do self reports of discrete emotions match with physiological reactions and whether

their reliability differs by the three types of news content we expose participants to?

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2) Does attention to information (time spent reading a treatment article) and information

seeking (time spent reading a press dossier) vary as a function of physiological emotional

reactions ?

3) Is information retention affected by physiological arousal?

Our longer term project seeks to respond to these questions from a gendered perspective.

Surprisingly, very few studies on the relevance of emotions in politics have tackled the

impact of gender, despite the important literature pertaining to the gender gap with respect

to political engagement (including political interest, political knowledge, and efficacy).

When it comes to gendered components of political learning, extensive and consistent

evidence suggests that women tend to know less about politics (at least traditionally

defined) than men (Verba et al. 1995; Delli Carpini and Keeter 1996; Stolle and Gidengil

2010). Yet, little is known about what causes these differences.

Work focusing on crisis communication provides an interesting contrast to this

overwhelmingly negative view of women’s political knowledge levels in the literature.

This research has found that the effect of emotion has a greater impact on information

processing for women than for men. Women are more likely to seek information in the

aftermath of situations generating psychological distress such as a campus shooting

(McIntyre et al. 2011), the collapse of a bridge (Nelson et al. 2009), and a hurricane (Spence

et al. 2007).1 In other words, when faced with anxiety-inducing circumstances, women are

likely to consume more information.

In this research we present here, we report the results of a pilot study that uses women

exclusively. Obviously, this does not allow us to test the gendered perspective. The results

should be interpreted then from the perspective of testing the feasibility of this

physiological study. Given the small sample, we chose to minimize variance by using only

women for the initial pilot. We describe the research design in more details in the following

section.

Research Design

The study is designed around a news article story that participants are exposed to, followed

by a fictional news website that includes articles related to the three issue areas covered in

the various treatment articles. The two treatment articles focus on threatening topics

(government spending on domestic violence and violence). A third control condition looks

at cultural spending in Montreal. (An example of the treatment article is available in the

Appendix)

1 The studies on crisis communication are based on real crises, with fieldwork conducted during or shortly

after dramatic events with people who have been involved. Participants are asked to fill questionnaires just a

few days or weeks after having experienced traumatic, anxiety-generating situations.

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The experimental protocol was as follows. After explaining the consent form, participants

were hooked up to the physiological testing equipment while seated at a computer. After

a welcome screen, participants viewed a blank screen for two minutes to create a baseline

period during which external stimulus was kept to a minimum. After they were invited to

carefully read the treatment article, the participants where asked the extent to which they

felt, among other emotions, 1) worried, 2) angry, and 3) optimistic. The participants were

then presented with a press dossier and were instructed to consult as many or as few articles

as they wished. The press dossier was the same for all conditions. It included the treatment

as the headline story, followed by nine articles: three pertained to domestic violence, three

to violence in general, and three were designed to be neutral or mildly positive, in line with

the topic of the third condition. The press dossier was designed to appear as a newspaper

homepage.

The use of newspaper articles allows us to convey information in a manner that resembles

what could take place in daily life, thus making the lab context less artificial. The

participants could navigate between articles in a closed online environment that mimicked

the website of La Presse, the largest daily in Quebec. All the information in the treatment

and dossier articles were taken from La Presse’s and Le Devoir’s archives. In addition to

modifying for length to ensure consistency across articles, revisions were also made when

necessary to remove “positive” information from the Condition 1 and 2 articles (for

example, statistics showing improvement with respect to violence against women in recent

years were removed or modified in order to correspond with the goal to generate negative

emotions).

When the participants left the website (by clicking “Continue”), they then received a

battery of knowledge questions related to the treatment article and the content of the press

dossier. Two questions pertained specifically to the treatment, followed by nine questions

bearing on the content of the other articles (one question per article). The questions were

designed to be easy to answer if someone had read the articles (we made sure the answers

could not be inferred from the titles that were used as hyperlinks). If they could not

remember or did not know the answer, participants could simply indicate “I do not know”.

They also answered a series of socio-demographic questions before concluding the

experiment.

The analysis combines between conditions and within subject analyses. First we evaluate

whether the three conditions generate the expected physiological reactions. Then, looking

at each participant separately, we check whether their physiological reactions match the

expected arousal and attentiveness patterns. The dependent variables are 1) physiological

reactions to the treatment articles (skin conductance and heart rate), 2) time spent reading

the treatment, 3) time spent reading the press dossier, and 4) a memory test about factual

information in the treatment article. We collected the data with the eVu TPS wireless sensor

attached to participants’ first finger and the BioExport software from Thought Technology

inc. The stimuli and questions were presented using the MediaLab software.

Respondents were 34 women who came to LACPOP at UQAM in May and June 2015.

They were recruited from large first-year courses (excluding political science). Participants

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received $10 for their participation in the study, which lasted about 15 minutes. They were

randomly assigned to one of three treatment groups.2 The final sample size was 31.3

Treatments involved the presentation of a news article (approximately 500 words) based

on real news articles. In Condition 1 and 2 the treatment articles were designed to induce

negative emotions such as anxiety, anger and fear. In Condition 1, the text focused on a

government initiative to combat domestic violence and included a host of statistics about

levels of such violence in Quebec and Canada. In Condition 2, the text was about a

government initiative to combat crime, and, like in Condition 1, included information about

violent crime rates in Quebec and Canada. In Condition 3, the text was designed to be

neutral, discussing a pilot project aiming at facilitating the use of public libraries by

immigrants in Montreal. The article was not meant to be enthusiasm-inducing, although it

might have induced mild enthusiasm in some participants.4

Measures

We use two physiological measures of the reactions generated by treatment exposure. First,

skin conductance as an indicator in the activation of the sympathic nervous system, is

strongly related to arousal levels reported by respondents (see Lang and Ewoldsen 2012).

In many studies, heart rate is used as a measure of attention or cognitive effort, denoted by

a deceleration (Lee and Lang 2009). Heart rate is not an overly reliable measure of valence

because it has been found to vary depending on the type of stimulus (see review by Lang

and Ewoldsen 2012). For example, heart rate was shown to increase, not decrease, while

participants viewed a short video showing a man threatening a boy with a knife (Palomba

et al 2000). While threat suggests a focus of attention on the threatening object/context and

thus a decelerating heart rate, a ‘flight reflex’ (ie avoidance) might turn attention away or

down (see Rajava 2004). In the Palomba et al. experiment, videos of surgery and

landscapes (of opposite valence) were both accompanied by a heart rate deceleration. Heart

rate discriminatory capacity is also limited during long stimuli (such as media messages

that can last 30 seconds or longer). Yet in some cases, it has been found to tell apart

exposure to negative, positive or neutral pictures for shorter intervals (see Lang and

Ewoldsen 2012 and Soroka et al, forthcoming).These inconsistent findings indicate that

heart rate should be interpreted with caution.

Because people have naturally varying heart rates and skin conductance to begin with, we

use normalized measures of both in our between groups analysis. As done by Soroka et al.

(2015) our models for physiological reactions use the participants’ physiological reaction

minus their mean reaction over the standard deviation. These scores were calculated for

2Due to technical difficulties, the first participants had to be assigned to the same condition; as soon as the

problem was fixed, all subsequent participants (the majority) were randomly assigned to one of the three

conditions. 3 Due to a technical error, one participant’s physiological data was not recorded. In another case, the

participant left the closed website while consulting the press dossier. A third participant read the treatment

article for a few seconds only (less than 10), which led to her exclusion from the sample. 4 The article did not refer to numbers or even to the phenomenon of immigration itself, but rather emphasized

immigrant integration in fairly generic terms.

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the entire experiment but for the analysis, we focus only on the first 60 seconds of reading

the treatment.5 This not only simplifies the analysis (we still have almost 20,000

observation points), but also focuses on the physiological response to the treatment, which

is the focus of the first part of our analysis.

For the within subject analysis, we use the difference between mean baseline reading and

the mean of the treatment reading. The baseline is our two measures of physiological

reactions recorded while the participants watched a blank screen for two minutes. We

compute the difference for both skin conductance and heart rate.

We have not yet coded externally the emotional content of the messages in the treatment

conditions. In a separate pilot experiment conducted in 2013 (which did not involve the

measurement of physiological reactions), we randomly assigned 160 UQAM students to

the same three treatments. After being invited to read carefully the treatment article, the

participants have been asked the extent to which they felt 1) worried, 2) angry, and 3)

optimistic. Participants were significantly more likely to report feeling worried when

confronted with the first, gender treatment condition compared to the second violent crime

treatment. When it comes to anger, the difference was even greater, with a full unit

difference between the violence condition and the gendered violence dimension. Both

levels were significantly higher that for Condition 3. There was no difference in the level

of optimism reported across Conditions 1 and 2; however, these levels were significantly

lower than for the third, control treatment (Gosselin and Harell 2013, 2015).6 Future

analyses with the current data will compare explicit and physiological reactions.

Finally, the measure of knowledge included in the within subject analysis is participants’

answer to two questions pertaining to the treatment article they read.

Results

In Table 1, we present the results of our treatments on physiological responses. We also

include a measure of 5-second time intervals and an interaction between time and

condition. The reason for this control is that physiological responses tend to peak and then

decay over time and we want to be able to capture this dynamic. The interaction allows for

different patterns based on condition. As we can see in the results, condition has a

significant impact on the physiological response, though with the number of cases we have,

the fact that it is significant is not surprising. What we do observe is that both Conditions

2 and 3 appear to evoke a greater reaction in terms of arousal (skin conductance), and less

in terms of attentiveness (heart rate) compared to the gendered violence treatment

(Condition 1). This is somewhat surprising as the treatment articles for Conditions 1 and

2 were very similar in terms of content. We would have expected them to elicit a more

5 All respondents consulted the treatment article for at least 60 seconds. 6 The first pilot study comprised both women and men. The direction of effects were consistent with the

expectation that women in general would feel\report greater levels of anxiety and anger. That is why we

chose to focus on female participants for the pilot study involving physiological reactions (no participant

took part in both experiments).

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similar reaction to each other than to the control condition, but this does not appear to be

the case.

[Table 1 about here]

The graphical representation of these relationship is perhaps more enlightening, and

somewhat in line with our expectations. Figure 1 and 2 show the relationship between time

(measured in 5 second intervals) and each physiological outcome by condition. The line is

a lowess smoothing over the raw data. In Figure 1, we focus on skin conductance, where

we expect increases to correspond to arousal. Across conditions, we see that arousal begins

high and wans over the 60 seconds of the treatment. This makes sense in so far as the initial

stimulus should wear off over time. We also see that participants in Condition 2 appear to

have started at a higher level of skin conductance compared to the control condition, and

especially the gendered violence treatment. These differences explain the somewhat

confounding results presented in Table 1, yet the pattern of response are interesting if we

ignore the differences in initial levels. In the gendered violence condition (1), we see that

there is actually an initial increase before the curve begins to decay. It lasts slightly longer

than Condition 2, which is in line with our expectation that women will be particularly

responsive to gendered threat. In contrast, in the control condition, arousal begins to wan

almost immediately.

[Figure 1 and 2 about here]

If we turn to Figure 2, our results are much less consistent across conditions and the patterns

vary considerable. In Condition 1, we observe the pattern we would have expected for

attentiveness. A decrease in heart rate that eventually begins to curve upwards toward the

end. We see vary little change in heart rate in Condition 2, and a slower decrease in the

control condition.

If we consider the effect of treatment on physiological reactions, then, our results suggest

the treatments did not have the expected effects, although they are suggestive in some cases

of the patterns we expect. One reason may be that media content is notoriously rich and

complex, even when manipulated to reflect (mostly) one emotion, or even more simply,

one direction (positive or negative). As Ryan (2012) notes, even carefully crafted political

messages often arouse more than a single emotion; the problem is particularly salient for

anger and anxiety, often found to go together. Based on the first pilot study, we know that

the gendered violence treatment is most likely to have generated higher levels of both

feelings in participants. Trying to match discrete emotions and physiological measures,

Lee and Lang (2009) find that anger does not elicit a clearly valenced reaction; it is both

aversive (as fear is) and appetitive (like joy). This might be why we find no clear ordering

pattern between the predicted heart rate levels between the three groups of respondents. As

far as arousal is concerned, while emotional content (positive or negative) is likely to

arouse, it might be that the control treatment generated more feelings than we expected.

A further potential issue with our violence and gendered violence treatments is that both

articles (as well as the control treatment article) start with an announcement about the

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government injecting money in tackling the problem. The rest of the treatment is clearly

negative but the positive content of the first sentence may have limited the expected

negative reaction.

If we turn to our cognitive outcomes, as presented in Table 2, we find further evidence that

our conditions did not evoke the expected responses. We present three dependent variable

means by condition: knowledge of all news content (treatment plus press dossier),

knowledge of the treatment article and time spent reading the treatment. We expected that

attentiveness should increase knowledge, and arousal may impact both retention and time

consuming the article. The initial test of this was whether our threatening conditions (1 and

2) lead to these results more than the control treatment.

[Table 2 about here]

Table 2 presents the means by condition. While none of these differences are significant

(which is unsurprising given our sample size), the direction of means suggest that

participants retained and read the most in the control condition rather than the violence

conditions, especially the straight crime treatment.

A cleaner test, especially given the unexpected treatment effects, is to examine the

physiological effects directly on these outcomes. For the sake of this paper, we focus on

the second two outcomes. (Overall knowledge was not significant in any of the models.)

In Table 3 and 4, we do precisely this. We examine if knowledge (Table 3) and time spent

reading the article (Table 4) increased when the respondent become more aroused and

attentive compared to their mean baseline reading.

[Table 3 and 4 about here]

Let us first consider arousal. We can see that skin conductance (or arousal) seems to be

significantly related to knowledge retention. Arousal was negatively related to knowledge

retention, so the more aroused, the less able the participant was to answer factual questions

bout the article. In contrast, arousal was positively related to time spent reading the article.

The latter effects are illustrated in Figure 3.

[Figure 3 about here]

When it comes to heart rate, we find no direct effect on either knowledge or time. This

may be because our small sample size just is not able to capture the effects, or that heart

rate is not directly capturing a clean measure of attentiveness. Yet, the small sample size

makes the skin conductance results even more compelling. Even with only 31 participants,

changes in skin conductance seems to predict both knowledge retention and time spent

perusing the article. The opposite direction of these effects however need further

exploration. While we expect attention to have positive effects on knowledge retention, our

results suggest that arousal can actually be detrimental to information retention, despite the

fact that a news story may have elicited more arousal.

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The results within subject analysis (regardless of conditions participants were assigned to)

are more in line with expectations. Higher skin conductance (measured by the change in

conductance between baseline and treatment) is associated with more time spent reading

the treatment article. Should this arousal come associated with negative feelings such a fear

and anger, the findings would be in line with Affective Intelligence Theory. Media

psychology studies also associate arousal with greater response to or involvement in a

stimulus (Hopkins and Fletcher 1994). According to AIT, this focus comes with better

retention; this is not what we observe in our study. The frequently established connection

between arousal and cognitive performance in psychological studies goes in both

directions. Lang et al. (2004) observed that higher arousal combined to media information

complexity worsened performance on a message recognition task, while Lee and Lang

(2009) found that the most ‘activated’ (arousing) emotions improved performance (save

for anger). The combination of high arousal and negative valence led to lower encoding of

media message in comparison with calm and negative stimuli (Lang et al. 2007).

Conclusions

This preliminary study served as a feasibility study for our larger interest in the ways in

which women and men engage with news media content. More specifically, we are

interested in differential emotional responses to news content and the ways in which they

influence cognition. The results presented here are only partly in line with our expectations.

While our experimental manipulations did not evoke the expected physiological reactions

among our all-female sample, there was a suggestion that the gendered violence article

elicited a spike in arousal as well as a longer period of arousal. When we turn to the

cognitive implications, we see that arousal is significantly related to both knowledge

retention and engagement with the news content (as measured by time).

Future research will expand this analysis to examining how the treatment conditions

influenced media consumption in the post-treatment news website, as well as delve deeper

into the ways in which explicit emotional assessments relate to our physiological data.

While the results presented here are preliminary, they suggest that incorporating

physiological measures into our understanding of news consumption and political

cognition may be an important avenue for future research.

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Table and Figures

Table 1: Physiological Responses by Condition and Time

Skin Conductance Heart Rate

Condition

2 0.33 (.020) 0.00 -0.10 (.024) 0.00

3 0.16 (.021) 0.00 -0.03 (.025) 0.25

Time -0.03 (.002) 0.00 -0.01 (.002) 0.00

Time*Condition

2 -0.01 (.003) 0.00 0.02 (.004) 0.00

3 -0.01 (.003) 0.02 -0.02 (.004) 0.00

Constant -0.08 (.013) 0.00 0.19 (.016) 0.00

N 18569 18569

Adj. R-

Squared 0.07 0.02

16

Table 2: Condition on Cognitive Outcomes

Condition

Knowledge

(All)

Knowledge

(Treatment) Time in Treatment

Mean (s.e) Mean (s.e.) Mean (s.e.)

Domestic Violence 4.00 0.49 1.25 0.18 151.42 (25.34)

Violence 3.80 0.63 1.30 0.21 143.20 (16.29)

Culture 5.11 0.39 1.67 0.17 155.33 (20.23)

17

Table 3: Treatment Article Knowledge Based on Physiological Responses

Coeff S.E. Sign.

∆ in Skin from Baseline to

Treatment -0.04 (0.23) 0.05

Constant 1.39 (0.11) 0.00

R-squared 0.00

∆ in Heart Rate from Base to Treat -0.01 (0.03) 0.63

Constant 1.40 (0.11) 0.00

R-squared 0.01

Note: N=31 across models

18

Table 4: Time Spent Reading Treatment Based on Changing Physiological

State

Coeff S.E. Sign.

∆ in Skin from Baseline to Treatment 47.31 (23.31) 0.05

Constant 145.00 (11.88) 0.00

R-squared 0.09

∆ in Heart Rate from Base to Treat -0.11 (2.88) 0.97

Constant 149.98 (12.57) 0.00

R-squared 0.00

Note: N=31 for each model

19

Figure 1: Skin Conductance by Condition and Time (Lowess)

20

Figure 2: Heart Rate by Condition and Time (Lowess)

21

Figure 3: Treatment Consumption (Time) Based on Skin Conductance

22

Appendix

Example of Treatment Article (Condition 2)

Le gouvernement canadien investira 57 millionsdans divers programmes de prévention au coursde cinq prochaines années pour lutter contre lacriminalité.

Le sénateur Pierre-Hugues Boisvenu a fait cetteannonce à Montréal la semaine dernière. Il s’agit dela seconde phase de la stratégie nationale de

prévention du crime, mise en œuvre en 2010. Selon les chiffres du Centre canadien de la statistique juridique (CCSJ), 2,2 millions de crimes ontété signalés à la police en 2011. Les crimes contre les biens sont à la baisse mais les crimesviolents (contre la personne) ont peu diminué. De 2000 à 2011, la baisse était de 6 % seulement.Le taux d'homicide au Canada est stable depuis 10 ans. Le portrait est plus sombre dans lesprairies et dans le Nord. Les taux de criminalité et les indices de gravité des crimes sont environdeux fois plus élevés au Nunavut et dans les Territoires du Nord-Ouest Les chiffres du CCSJ incluent seulement les crimes signalés à la police. Or, seulement un crimesur trois est déclaré, selon la dernière Enquête sociale sur la victimisation. Au Québec, 60 % descrimes ne sont pas signalés. "C'est énorme, lance Irvin Waller, chercheur au CCSJ. Il faut doncêtre prudent en interprétant les données." Le Service de police de la Ville de Montréal (SPVM) compte sur une nouvelle arme pour s'attaquerà la criminalité: un classement inédit qui répertorie, arrondissement par arrondissement, les crimescontre la personne et contre la propriété. Cet outil servira de point de départ aux dirigeants ducorps policier dans l'élaboration de leurs priorités en matière de sécurité publique pour les troisprochaines années. Le territoire englobant La Petite-Bourgogne, Pointe Saint-Charles et Saint-Henri a le plus haut tauxde crimes contre la personne à Montréal. Hochelaga-Maisonneuve et Montréal-Nord suivent deprès. Ainsi, 24 crimes contre la personne sont commis par tranche de 1000 habitants dans lesecteur au sommet du classement. Dans les secteurs les plus sûrs de l'île (dont Saint-Laurent etMont-Royal-Outremont), on compte moins de 5 crimes contre la personne par 1000 habitants. Leportrait est différent lorsqu'on se penche sur les crimes contre la propriété. Les secteurs les plustouchés sont le Plateau-Mont-Royal, La Petite Italie et La Petite-Patrie. Il y a plus de 80 crimescontre la propriété pour 1000 habitants.

57 millions de dollars pour combattre la criminalité