The effects of colour and valence on news evaluation

Abstract

Research across different fields of psychology has reported effects of colour cues on a variety of cognitive processes. Especially, the colour red has been shown to have striking influences. In the context of media reception, however, colour effects have been widely neglected so far. This study made a first step in this direction by investigating the effects of the colour red (compared with blue and grey) on the way news articles are evaluated. Two types of news were framed by a coloured border while the valence of the news content additionally varied. Based on 369 participants who read and evaluated the news articles online, we observed effects for colour cues and news valence in the absence of an interaction effect, indicating that the colour red induced approach motivation. However, only the contrast between red and grey reached statistical significance, indicating that chromatic and achromatic colours may differ in their perceived visual saliency. Overall, these results provide an important complement to previous studies and have practical implications for media researchers and producers.

Thrilling News Revisited: The Role of Suspense for the Enjoyment of News Stories

“…Following previous studies on news evaluation (Kaspar et al, 2015a,c), we applied a two-step procedure to exclude participants who were either too fast or too slow, which may indicate a lack of engagement or distracted attention, a common concern in online studies. Firstly, participants were excluded when their completion time was part of the lower or upper 5% of the sample.…”

“…Not surprisingly, the perception of news is one main topic of media research. Besides effects of peripheral cues (e.g., Gerend and Sias, 2009; Kaspar et al, 2015a) and the visualization of news (e.g., Kaspar et al, 2015c; Lee and Kim, 2015) on reception and evaluation processes, researchers intensively investigated how news influences perceived issue salience as well as attitudes and opinions (cf. McCombs and Reynolds, 2002; Reese, 2007).…”

Who Likes What Kind of News? The Relationship Between Characteristics of Media Consumers and News Interest

“…Also, the amount of healthrelated news in mass media has recently changed dramatically due to the global pandemic, so that salient news coverage may act as a moderator of the relationship between consumer characteristics and news interest in terms of agenda setting effects (cf., Wanta & Ghanem, 2007). Another line of research emphasizes the significant role of the framing of a news story on consumers' news interest (Kaspar et al, 2016), the role of the motivational valence of a news article's content and the effect of color cues on news interest (Kaspar et al, 2017), and the effect of font type on news interest (Kaspar, Wehlitz, et al, 2015). However, these studies did not consider individual differences in consumers' characteristics.…”

Цвет Как Инструмент Управления Эмоциями В Публикациях О Пандемии COVID-19 В Русскоязычных Онлайн-Сми

“…Цвет изображения коррелировал с темой информационного сообщения, представленной в нем общей оценкой ситуации и перспектив ее развития. Черный цвет использовался для формирования эмоционального фона страха и поддерживался обилием военных метафор в заголовках [Gerend, Sias, 2009;Chien, 2011;Gnambs, Appel, Oeberst, 2015;Kaspar et al, 2017]. Позитивная оценка происходящего обозначалась цветами теплой части спектра -красным и желтым; негативная -темными коричневым и серым.…”

“…Изображения описываемых событий вселяют в людей гораздо больше страха, чем информация, которую они получают непосредственно из текста [Iyer, Oldmeadow, 2006;Garfin, Silver, Holman, 2020]. При этом сюжет визуального сообщения меняет степень его убедительности гораздо в меньшей степени [Seo, 2020], чем цвет, который способен заметно изменить впечатление и оценку читателем представленной информации [Kaspar et al, 2017], повлиять на его привычки и принимаемые решения [Gerend, Sias, 2009;Chien, 2011;Gnambs, Appel, Oeberst, 2015].…”