Emotional response to pictures of the armed conflict in Colombia.

Abstract

After a 5-decade armed conflict, a peace process was recently initiated in Colombia. Researchers of this conflict have frequently argued that decades of excessive mass-media exposure to conflict-related information have resulted in negative emotional outcomes in the Colombian population, which could be responsible for the observed apathy and disbelief regarding peace. Notwithstanding the relevance of these theoretical analyses, no experimental studies have explored the emotional response of the Colombian population to information depicting different types of conflict-related violence. In the present study, a well-established experimental methodology (Affective Image Visualization Paradigm; Bradley, Greenwald, & Hamm, 1993) was adapted to explore the emotional responses of college students (N ϭ 231) to photographs depicting the Colombian armed conflict. Relevant pictures were obtained from national and international newspapers and magazines via a systematic search. The 48 selected images portrayed the 5 types of violence that characterized the Colombian armed conflict, namely massacres, terrorist attacks, raids, forced recruitment, and kidnapping/forced disappearances. The participants' emotional experiences of the Colombian-conflict photographs were assessed across the dimensions of valence, arousal, and dominance. Colombian-conflict images produced strong negative affective states, similar to those elicited by unpleasant images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS; Lang, Bradley, & Cuthbert, 2008). Women experienced these emotional states with more intensity than men. Images portraying massacres and terrorist attacks produced higher emotional reactivity. Lastly, perceived relation of the images to the Colombian conflict and age predicted the intensity of the Editor's Note. Continue the conversation by submitting your comments and questions about this article/book review to PeacePsychology .org/peaceconflict. (The Editor of PeacePsychology.org reserves the right to exclude material that fails to contribute to constructive discussion.

The emotional fallout of armed conflict in Colombia: Emotions, empathy, and aggression in victims, indirect victims, and members of the military.

“…Higher levels of arousal are usually associated with low levels of dominance (Hurtado-Parrado et al, 2020). Due to the victims’ exposure to the armed conflict, it suggests emotional hyperreactivity to different types of social stimuli (positive, neutral, or negative).…”

It matters what you see: Graphic media images of war and terror may amplify distress

“…Second, to our knowledge, with a few exceptions (e.g., refs. 26 – 28 ), experimental studies have not used real-life images of graphic violence and they have largely examined outcomes quite different from those discussed above. One study showed bloody or gory images from the International Affective Pictures System (IAPS) ( 29 ); subjects were told they were real or were shown the same pictures with false Hollywood copyrights and told they were not real, and then were asked how negatively they felt about each of the images.…”

“…However, knowing how negative an image is scored is not the same as knowing how much distress a person experiences after seeing the image. A second study asked respondents to rate how pleasant and arousing IAPS images and images from the armed conflict in Columbia were using visual analog scales of happy/unhappy and sleepy/excited figures ( 27 ). Again, the affective valence assigned to an image is not equivalent to the experience of psychological distress evoked by an image.…”

PROTOCOL: What are the effects of different elements of media on radicalization outcomes? A systematic review

“…While this short description should not be considered a comprehensive review of the different perspectives, it highlights how the different types of media have the potential to contribute to radicalization. An extensive literature distantly related to the topic of the current review has found that exposure to images related to terrorism, such as those depicted in the media, can have negative psychological effects (e.g., Felix et al, 2020 ; Hurtado‐Parrado et al, 2020 ). However, it remains under‐researched as to how the different types of exposure and interactions with different medias impact radical attitudes and behaviours specifically.…”