Stereotypical Portrayals of Emotionality in News Photos

Abstract

This research content analyzed the news photographs of a major US daily newspaper to examine the emotional portrayals of individuals in different gender, age and ethnic subgroups. A multidimensional measure of emotion (pleasure, arousal, dominance) was used. A total of 1,595 individuals were coded. The results demonstrate that emotionality was stereotyped to some degree, particularly in relation to females, ethnic minorities and senior citizens. Specifically, African Americans were depicted as excited whereas Asian Americans were seen as calm.Females were portrayed as happy and teens were shown as sad. The results support the social construction of emotion and suggest that the news media play a role in framing and constructing emotional meaning with regard to different subgroups in American society. Stereotypical Portrayals of Emotionality in News PhotosResearch on visual stereotypes abounds but surprisingly few studies have examined emotionality and stereotypes in photographs. Pictures are emotional representations of reality that convey important information about gender, age and ethnic groups (Blackwood, 1983).Emotions refer to specific feelings conveyed by individuals who are photographed-whether happy or sad, excited or calm, or submissive or dominant.Research has demonstrated that visual images can influence public knowledge (Iyengar, 1991) and enhance viewers' recall of news stories (Graber, 1990), suggesting that visual imagery plays an important role in helping news consumers make sense of the world around them (Matthews & Reuss, 1985). A clear benefit of visual communication is its ability to transcend textual limitations and convey emotions in addition to factual evidence (Lester, 2000). However, this field of research has not progressed past early constructions of emotionality (Wanta & Leggett, 1989). Because news photos are often scanned first (Miller, 1975) and can contain highly vivid images that can form long-lasting impressions on memory (Lester, 2000), it is important to examine the emotional content of photos to determine whether different subgroups in America are marginalized or stereotyped in relation to their emotions.Our purpose is to extend the literature on stereotypes by drawing upon a long-standing multi-dimensional conceptualization of emotion used extensively in psychology. Known as PAD (pleasure, arousal, dominance), the idea was to examine how individuals of different genders, ages and ethnicities are framed in terms of their emotions. We argue that the expression of emotion is biological and cultural-biological in terms of gender, age and ethnicity and cultural in terms of newsroom decisions that translate to emotional depictions of individuals in different gender, age and ethnic groups. For instance, we expect that there will be different kinds of events 4 across the sections of the newspaper that will translate to emotions expressed by different genders, ages and ethnicities represented within those sections. Trends in the multi-dimensional levels of emotional representa...

Gender in Spanish Daily Newspapers

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