Negative comments on news and pseudo-news on the Internet attract more attention than positive ones, a study by the universities of Amsterdam and Wageningen shows. Communication scientists Susann Kohout, Sanne Kruikemeier and Bert N. Bakker presented artificial messages that resembled Facebook posts to 169 students equipped with an eye tracker set in an Amsterdam laboratory. The posts received emotional, sober, positive, negative, angry or fearful comments. With the set, the experts were able to see where the test subjects were looking.
Emotional things are often harmful
The students were divided into two groups – the heuristic and the systematic processing group. Participants in the heuristic group only had 30 seconds to read the posts. The participants in the systematic group were allowed to read the articles carefully and without any time limit.
News posts shared on social media often draw emotionally charged comments. Additionally, these comments are often negative, which can have damaging consequences. For example, emotional comments under news stories can fuel distrust of sources. The consequences had not yet been scientifically examined.
The eye tracker recorded the students' eye movements. The researchers then recorded how long participants spent on each comment and message. They found that students lingered longer on negative comments than on positive comments, but only in the heuristic group. This suggests that students read negative comments more often than positive ones when they had little time available. The subjects in the systematic group looked at the angry comments longer than the fearful ones. This suggests that subjects pay more attention to detail when they have more time on their hands, they say.
Important for further studies
“We have shown that it is important to distinguish discrete negative emotions such as anger and fear because they can affect readers in very different ways. Future research can build on our study to evaluate the effects of different emotions, emotional signals and processing strategies, as well as different message providers, formats and topics. “Secondly, future research should consider how emotionally engaged people are when reading comments and how that influences information processing,” said Kohout and her colleagues.
Source: Press release
about the study: May I have your attention, please? An eye tracking study on emotional social media comments
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