Does incivility in political discourse have adverse effects on public regard for politics? If so, why? In this study we present a theory suggesting that when viewers are exposed to televised political disagreement, it often violates well-established face-to-face social norms for the polite expression of opposing views. As a result, incivility in public discourse adversely affects trust in government. Drawing on three laboratory experiments, we find that televised presentations of political differences of opinion do not, in and of themselves, harm attitudes toward politics and politicians. However, political trust is adversely affected by levels of incivility in these exchanges. Our findings suggest that the format of much political television effectively promotes viewer interest, but at the expense of political trust.

This paper uses a limited capacity information processing theory of television viewing to investigate the effects of graphic negative video at four levels of processing (attention, capacity, encoding, and retrieval) and on two dimensions of emotional experience (arousal and valence). Results indicate that the presence of negative video in news stories increases attention, increases the amount of capacity required to process the message, increases the ability to retrieve the story, facilitates recognition of information presented during the negative video and inhibits recognition for information presented before the negative video. Results also indicate that the introduction of negative video increases the self-reported negative emotional impact of the story -making it more arousing and more negative.What happens to viewers when a broadcast news story includes graphic, unpleasant, negative video images? It is generally accepted that the presence of negative video (usually defined as violent or horrible images) changes the quality and quantity of memory that viewers have for news stories (This study is designed not to ask //"negative video has an effect on viewers (we are convinced it does) but rather to explain how negative video affects information processing. Towards this end the limited capacity approach to television viewing (A. Lang, 1995a) is combined with a dimensional theory of emotional processing (Bradley, 1994) and applied to the question of how the information processing of a hews story changes if the story contains negative video. The goal of this exercise is twofold: first, to further test the theory's ability to explain and predict how viewers process specific types of television messages; second, to provide a single framework which accommodates all of the dependent variables listed above.

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This study examined the relationship between compelling negative images in television news and m e m o y for information in the stories. Memo y dafferences u w e found before, during, and after the presence of negative compelling images. Memo y was worse for material that preceded the negatiue scenes. During negative scenes, memory was worse for semantically intact audio information such as qeech than for nonsemantic aural information such as screams or crashing noises. Memoy jor ilisual material presented after compelling negative images was better than memo y for material presented before compelling negative images. Results are discussed in relation to retroactizje inhibition and proactive .facilitation of memo y , and in relation to theories about the effects of emotion in cognitive processing.Television images add a dimension of information to news not available solely through the printed words in a newspaper or the sounds of a radio. Nowhere is this more evident than in the depiction of certain life-threatening emotioncharged events, such as wars, disasters, or social mayhem. Professional journalists intuitively understand that while images of tragedy and human distress are aesthetically difficult to look at, they demand viewer attention in ways that other images do not. Yet, despite the intuitive appeal of the idea that visual images may add a dimension of information to the presentation of news, research in television news has shown only weak or sometimes conflicting results in this area (Gunter, 1987). In this article we examine how compelling nonverbal information, such as the images of war, disaster, and civil mayhem on the evening news, change the way viewers process information. We argue that these images affect both the quality and quantity of memory in ways that differ from verbal information. Specifically, we will examine the idea that compelling negative images retroactively inhibit memory for material that precedes them, while they proactively enhance memory for material that follows them.