Effects of Disturbing News on Recall of Subsequently Presented News

In: Communication research, Volume 17, Issue 5, p. 601-615

Abstract

Both male and female respondents were exposed to a television news program. Immediately following exposure to either an emotionally disturbing or an innocuous, affectively neutral news story, respondents watched a sequence of standard news items. The placement of these items was systematically varied through three time slots of 90 s each. In the two preexposure conditions, all items appeared equally often in all time slots, thus allowing comparisons over time as well as at given times. A surprise information-acquisition test was administered for the contents of the news items. Compared with the control condition, the acquisition of information from the news items following the emotionally charged, disturbing story was significantly poorer for a period of 3 min. No appreciable difference in information acquisition was observed thereafter. The apparent impairment of information acquisition, processing, storage, and retrieval after emotionally charged news stories is discussed in terms of emotion theory. Practical implications are considered.