Narine S. Yegiyan

Informing Citizens: How People with Different Levels of Education Process Television, Newspaper, and Web News

This experiment tested the interaction of media channels (television, newspaper, and the Web), time delay, and the education level of audience members, using three memory measures. The lower education group encoded, stored, and retrieved television news information best while they showed less memory capacity for newspaper and Web news. For the higher education group, the opposite pattern emerged. They had better memory for newspaper and Web versions of news, compared to television. With time delay, these patterns persisted. They were also robust when controlling for participant evaluations of the news stories in terms of interest, informativeness, and understandability.

Processing Central and Peripheral Detail: How Content Arousal and Emotional Tone Influence Encoding

This study investigates how visual details are encoded as a function of centrality of content, emotional intensity (arousal), and valence (pleasant/unpleasant). The study uses a new measure of visual content centrality and periphery based on structural rather than content features of mediated events. Seventy-two pictures were selected from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) using valence and arousal norms published with the system. Recognition was used to track encoding. Results suggest that central details are recognized better than peripheral details as arousal increases. The encoding of central compared to peripheral detail is less prone to cognitive overload. The findings reveal a remarkable hierarchy that is consistent with the motivational perspective on cognition and suggests that as emotional experience intensifies the organism gives up on encoding for peripheral negative detail sooner and more rapidly than for peripheral positive detail.

Encoding details: Positive emotion leads to memory broadening

In the current experiment we tested the hypothesis that unlike negative arousal, which leads to memory narrowing effects whereby an increase in memory for the central details is accompanied by a decrease in memory for the peripheral details, positive arousing events might lead to a memory broadening effect such that positive arousal would increase memory for both central and peripheral details. This was assessed by testing recognition for central and peripheral details of pictures that were selected to vary in a continuous manner across a wide range of arousal for both positive and negative items. The results indicated that increases in both positive and negative stimulus arousal levels led to gradual increases in memory for the central aspects of the photos. In contrast, negative arousal first increased then decreased memory for peripheral detail as arousal levels increased, whereas positive arousal led to a continuous increase in memory for peripheral details. Thus, arousing negative materials lead to memory narrowing, whereas arousing positive materials can lead to memory broadening.

Individual Differences in Motivational Activation Influence Responses to Pictures of Taboo Products

In this article, the authors investigated responses to pictures of products whose use is socially or legally restricted for teens and young adults (e.g., beer, liquor, cigarettes). The authors theorized and found that these pictures are motivationally relevant and therefore elicit automatic activation in the appetitive/approach or aversive/defensive motivational systems, which leads to increased attention, arousal, emotional response, and memory for the risky products. The authors also found that these responses are mediated by individual differences in motivational reactivity. The authors suggest that placing images of these products in prevention messages may work against the prevention goal by increasing appetitive activation and positive emotion in populations more inclined to take risks.

Covering Presidential Election Campaigns: Does Reporter Gender Affect the Work Lives of Correspondents and Their Reportage?

This content analysis reveals that men and women network news correspondents differed in how they covered 4 presidential elections (1992–2004). There were fewer women than men reporters involved in election coverage, but on average, women reported more stories than men and were tonally tougher watchdogs than men. In terms of framing candidates, male reporters were strongly associated with a masculine approach that emphasized the competitiveness of campaigns. By contrast, women correspondents employed both more feminine and gender-neutral frames than their male colleagues. These findings were interpreted against the backdrop of information derived from in-depth interviews with 5 women reporters who appeared in the sampled content.

Gun Focus Effect Revisited Emotional Tone Modulates Information Processing Strategy

This study attempts to clarify the relationship between message emotional tone and memory vividness, specifically gun focus effect. Based on findings in neuroimaging research, it is claimed here that positive and negative messages trigger different processing mechanisms in the brain and therefore later detail retrieval is dependent on the degree to which the same processing paths are activated. Overall, data support an assumption that visual recognition aids negative arousing content detail memory more than positive. In contrast, cued recall procedure is more helpful for recalling positive detail. For central detail the matching cues work together with the arousing content to boost memory specificity. Yet for peripheral detail, the matching cues help overcome the harmful effects of arousing content by reducing forgetting. Thus visual recognition minimizes gun focus effect for negative visual content and enhances it for positive. At the same time, a cued recall task minimizes gun focus effect for positive visual content and enhances it for negative.

Mediated Substance Cues: Motivational Reactivity and Use Influence Responses to Pictures of Alcohol

This study examined how emotional and physiological responses to pictures of alcoholic or nonalcoholic beverages vary as a function of motivational type and alcohol use. The authors used the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing to guide predictions and the motivational activation measure to measure the reactivity of participants’ appetitive and aversive motivational systems. Participants viewed and rated 9 pictures of alcoholic beverages and 9 pictures of nonalcoholic beverages. Facial electromyography data were collected during viewing. Overall results show that heavy users respond both more positively and more negatively to pictures of alcoholic beverages than to pictures of nonalcoholic beverages, whereas light users respond more positively overall and more positively to pictures of alcoholic beverages than to pictures of nonalcohol beverages. In addition, heavy use predictably reverses the response predicted by motivational type.

Explicating the Emotion Spillover Effect At the Intersection of Motivational Activation, Resource Allocation, and Consolidation

Abstract. This study proposed and tested the idea that the processing of advertisements following emotionally arousing stimuli is a function of the interaction between motivational system activation and consolidation of the preceding message content in memory. To explain this phenomenon, two competing hypotheses were posed: the motivational decay hypothesis and the consolidation interference hypothesis. Physiological, behavioral, and self-reported data were used to test the predictions. The results demonstrated higher levels of physiological arousal and higher levels of physiological and self-reported positivity and negativity when processing advertisements preceded by arousing positive and negative movie clips. The heart rate data showed that the appetitive motivational system facilitated higher cognitive effort (slower heart rate), and the aversive motivational system facilitated lower cognitive effort (faster heart rate). The state of cognitive overload was reached during the first 10 s of the ads foll...

Gun Focus Effect Revisited II How Sex Modulates Emotional Information Processing Strategy

Studies have consistently found that arousal is associated with enhanced recognition and recall. In these studies, the influence of participant sex was unexamined. However, motivational theories of emotion predict evolutionarily bound emotional experiences with specific mediated content which vary between men and women. This study draws upon motivational theories of emotion and recent evidence from neuroimaging research to examine comprehensive effects of message arousal and emotional tone on memory for message detail as a function of sex. Female participants showed an advantage in processing peripheral detail when information was positive and when questions about details were in a verbal cued recall format. Male participants were immune to memory narrowing for highly arousing negative content when questions about details were posed in a visual recognition task format.

Food as Risk: How Eating Habits and Food Knowledge Affect Reactivity to Pictures of Junk and Healthy Foods

ABSTRACT This study explores how people respond to images of junk versus healthy food as a function of their eating habits and food knowledge. The experiment reported here proposed and tested the idea that those with unhealthy eating habits but highly knowledgeable about healthy eating would feel more positive and also more negative toward junk food images compared to images of healthy food because they may perceive them as risky—desirable but potentially harmful. The psychophysiological data collected from participants during their exposure to pictures of junk versus healthy food supported this idea. In addition, unhealthy eaters compared to healthy eaters with the same degree of food knowledge responded more positively to all food items. The findings are critical from a health communication perspective. Because unhealthy eaters produce stronger emotional responses to images of junk food, they are more likely to process information associated with junk food with more cognitive effort and scrutiny. Thus, when targeting this group and using images of junk food, it is important to combine these images with strong message claims and relevant arguments; otherwise, if the arguments are perceived as irrelevant or weak, the motivational activation associated with junk food itself may transfer into an increased desire to consume the unhealthy product.