Psychological impact of mass violence depends on affective tone of media content
Psychological impact of mass violence depends on affective tone of media content
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DOI：
10.1371/journal.pone.0213891
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发表时间：
2019-04-01
期刊：
影响因子：
3.7
通讯作者：
Quigley, Karen S.
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
Wormwood, Jolie Baumann;Lin, Yu-Ru;Quigley, Karen S.
事实证明，媒体对大规模暴力的报道可以预测较差的心理健康症状。然而，尚不清楚此类媒体报道是否会对普通社区成员产生普遍影响，并扩展到构成日常决策和行为基础的生物和感知过程。在这里，我们在波士顿马拉松爆炸案一周年期间使用了重复测量设计，以跟踪参与者自我报告的痛苦、他们在观看爆炸图像时的眨眼惊吓反应，以及他们在行为射击任务中感知区分武装人员和手无寸铁的个人的能力。我们利用计算语言学方法，从参与者最常自我报告的阅读来源中抽取新闻内容，然后量化有关马拉松新闻报道的程度和新闻报道的情感语气。结果显示，当最近的马拉松新闻报道包含更多情感上的负面词汇时，参与者会经历更大的当前痛苦、对威胁的更大的生理反应以及更差的感知敏感性。这是第一篇研究媒体在报道大规模暴力时的情感基调与个人的威胁感知和生理威胁反应之间关系的实证研究。
Exposure to media coverage of mass violence has been shown to predict poorer mental health symptomology. However, it is unknown whether such media coverage can have ubiquitous effects on average community members, extending to biological and perceptual processes that underlie everyday decision making and behavior. Here, we used a repeated-measures design over the first anniversary of the Boston Marathon bombings to track participants' self-reported distress, their eye blink startle reactivity while viewing images of the bombings, and their ability to perceptually distinguish armed from unarmed individuals in a behavioral shooting task. We leveraged a computational linguistics method in which we sampled news content from the sources our participants most commonly self-reported reading, and then quantified both the extent of news coverage about the marathon and the affective tone of that news coverage. Results revealed that participants experienced greater current distress, greater physiological reactivity to threats, and poorer perceptual sensitivity when recent news coverage of the marathon contained more affectively negative words. This is the first empirical work to examine relationships between the media's affective tone in its coverage of mass violence and individuals' threat perception and physiological threat reactivity.