Emotion-Provoking Personalization of News

Abstract

Emotion is often treated as unconducive to rationality and informed citizenship. For this reason, journalistic styles that personalize issues and elicit emotion are typically not taken seriously as information sources. The experimental study reported here tested these sentiments through the knowledge gap hypothesis. Eight investigative news stories, arguably important to informed citizenship (e.g., child labor, corruption in public housing administration, lethality of legal drugs), were each presented in two versions. One featured emotional testimony of ordinary people who experienced the issue, and the other did not—resembling the traditional view of news as cold hard facts. Emotional versions were associated with smaller knowledge gaps between higher and lower education groups. Moreover, the size of knowledge gaps varied across three memory measures: free recall, cued recall, and recognition. Contrary to the inimical role that is traditionally assigned to emotion, these findings suggest a facilitative role for emotion in informing citizens.