Anastasia Kononova

Exploring the Hardwired for News Hypothesis: How Threat Proximity Affects the Cognitive and Emotional Processing of Health-Related Print News

This study explored how the proximity of threatening health news affects cognition and emotion through a 2 (Proximity: High/Low) × 4 (Topic) fractional experiment. Fifty-one participants read four news stories about either local or distant health threats, with their heart rate, skin conductance, and corrugator electromyography recorded. Results showed that high-proximity health threats elicited greater heart rate deceleration than did low-proximity health threats, indicating greater allocation of automatic resources to encoding high-proximity threats. Recognition data demonstrated that details from high-proximity health threats were recognized more accurately than details from low-proximity health threats. There were no significant effects of proximity on either skin conductance levels or corrugator activation. These results are discussed in terms of Shoemakers (1996) hardwired for news hypothesis and A. Langs (2000, 2006) limited capacity model.

Media Effects on Russian Students’ Attitudes toward the United States of America

Russian students were surveyed to compare media consumption and attitudes toward the United States of America and find relationships between the use of media and the image of the United States. Television and the Internet were the most popular sources of the information about the United States. To get news, students who had never been to the United States used Russian media, mostly television, while those who visited the USA used primarily Web sites from American and international media. Russian students studying in America were more likely to believe that Americans were depicted accurately by American television than Russian students studying in Russia. “Americanized Russians” had more favorable overall attitude toward the United States than “Russian Russians.” Standard regressions showed that the use of Internet affected the overall attitude.

The effect of perceived susceptibility on autonomic responses to and memory for health-related news

Presentation of an accessory intense acoustic stimulus coinciding with the onset of the visual imperative stimulus (IS) in a forewarned simple RT task facilitates RTrelative to IS alone trials (StartReac effect) and elicits blinks larger than those seen on control trials. In Experiment 1, 95 or 105 dBA noise bursts of 0 or 30 ms rise time were presented during half the 5 s ISs in a simpleRTtask at lead intervals of 0, 50 and 150 ms and during intertrial intervals. RT was facilitated in the presence of an accessory acoustic stimulus and the extent of RT facilitation decreasedwith increasing lead interval. Blinks were larger at the 0 ms lead interval than at longer lead intervals or during intertrial intervals. However, blink startle magnitude or blink facilitation were not related to RT or RT facilitation suggesting that, contrary to previous suggestions, startle does not mediate the Start- Reac effect. Experiment 2 varied the reporting and response requirements to the IS to assess whether attention to the IS or motor preparation affected blink facilitation at 0 ms. Blinks were elicited 0 or 150 ms after IS onset. RT was shortest in the presence of an accessory acoustic stimulus at 0 ms and slower if presentation of the IS required additional report. Neither motor preparation nor the additional attention requirement to the IS affected the extent of blink facilitation at 0 ms. Thus, blink facilitation at 0 ms seems to reflect on the summation of sub-reflex threshold excitation by the IS and super-reflex threshold excitation by the reflex eliciting stimulus in the motor pathway.The pattern of attentional startle is modulated when the lead stimulus and startle eliciting stimulus are presented in different modalities. Startle modulation is said to be modality specific if startles are inhibited and modality non specific if startles are facilitated relative to baseline. This finding is of theoretical interest as modality specificity is indicative of early selection and modality non-specificity of late selection mechanisms. Previous research provided evidence for modality specificity in continuous performance tasks, and modality non-specificity in tasks that assessed attention to discrete stimuli. The present research investigated experimental conditions that may determine the engagement of early or late selection mechanisms. Participants were given a target detection task under conditions that approximated continuous performance (Group 1), discrete trials(Group 3), and continuous performance with discrete trials (Group 2). Blink startles elicited with a burst of white noise were recorded at 120 ms or 1200 ms, during targets, non-targets and baseline. Blink startle was inhibited relative to baseline in all three groups. Contrary to expectations, greater inhibition during targets compared to non targets was found in Groups 2 and 3 but not inGroup 1. The current results are consistent with a modality specific account of attentional startle modulation. Moreover, we propose on the basis of the current results that within the early selection mechanism, attention may be more or less engaged depending on the overall context of the task.