Do Women and Men Respond Differently to Negative News?
Stuart Soroka, McGill University
Elisabeth Gidengil, McGill University
Patrick Fournier, Université de Montréal
Lilach Nir, Hebrew University
Paper prepared for the First Annual School of Politics and Global Studies Working Group
Conference: Women, Media, and Politics: A Comparative Perspective
Introduction
There is a persistent gender gap in news consumption and attention to hard news. Women in
the United States report spending significantly less time consuming news than men do
(Benesch 2012). This is the case for reading newspapers, listening to the news on the radio
and getting news online. The gender gap only ceases to be significant in the case of watching
news on television. Moreover, women are significantly less likely than men to follow news
about politics in Washington and international affairs. These gender gaps cannot be
explained by socioeconomic or other socio-demographic differences. They hold regardless
of income, education, labor market status, marital status, race and age. The gender gaps are
not confined to the United States. Data from the World Values Survey reveal a significant
gender gap in news consumption in 45 of 63 countries, even controlling for sociodemographic characteristics (Benesch 2012). Similarly, the European Social Survey reports
that women spend less time than men consuming news in all but two of the 28 countries
surveyed (Benesch 2012).
The pervasive negativity of news content has been suggested as one reason why women
typically pay less attention than men to news about politics (Grabe and Kamhawi 2006;
Kamhawi and Grabe 2008). Negative content dominates the news (for a review of the vast
literature, see Soroka 2014). As Newhagen (1998) has observed, viewers of the typical
television news broadcast are exposed to “more images of violence, suffering, and death in a
half hour than most people would normally view in a lifetime” (p. 267). Surveys report that
women are much more likely than men to cite an undue focus on war and violence as a
reason for not following international news (Pew 2002) and many more women than men
say that they often find the news depressing (Pew 2004). Women are also less likely than
men to say that they find the news entertaining or enjoyable and more likely to agree that
there is “too much violence, disaster and tragedy” in television news shows (Klein 2003).
This same survey reported that women were more likely than men to report that television
news makes them worry and that violent story or picture content causes them to turn the
news off. Women were also more likely to say that they would be happy to see more good
news.
The survey evidence is certainly suggestive of a possible link between negativity in the news
and the gender gap in news consumption. However, only a handful of studies have used
experimental designs to test whether there is indeed a causal connection. The results have
been mixed. Moreover, these experiments have relied on self-reports, raising concerns about
possible social desirability bias as well as the potential unreliability of reports of internal
states (Kleemans et al. 2012). In this paper, we report the results of a series of
psychophysiological experiments that use physiological measurements of skin conductance
and heart rate to test for gender differences in responses to negative news stories.
Experiments on Gender and Negativity in the News
Grabe and Kamhawi (Grabe and Kamhawi 2006; Kamhawi and Grabe 2008) conducted the
first experiments on gendered responses to negativity in the news. They draw on
evolutionary psychology to explain why responses to negative news are likely to be
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gendered.1 Underpinning their explanation is “the media-equal-real-life idea” (Grabe 2011).
The media equation holds that “There is no switch in the brain that can be thrown to
distinguish the real and mediated worlds” (Reeves and Nass 1996). As a result, viewers are
apt to respond automatically to threatening media messages as if they represented present
and immediate threats. Indeed, according to Shoemaker (1996), the media fulfill a critical
surveillance function in alerting audiences to potential threats, and human beings, in turn, are
“hardwired” to prefer such negative news.
According to evolutionary psychologists, human beings have been biologically programmed
to respond to potential threats to their survival. These threats can induce either approach or
avoidance, depending on the seriousness of the threat to survival. However, the response
also depends on the gender of the person who is experiencing the threat. Research in
neuroscience and psychology has found that women appear to exhibit a stronger avoidance
response in the face of threat than men do. In evolutionary terms, this is attributed to the
importance of the mother’s survival to the survival of her offspring. Men’s propensity to
approach potential dangers, on the other hand, is linked to the need to protect their offspring.
Grabe and Kamhawi suggest that these gender differences in responses to threat will also be
evident when the threat is mediated rather than real. As a result, women will be more likely
than men to avoid negative news.
Grabe and Kamhawi use laboratory experiments to test a number of empirical implications
of their argument. Participants were presented with eight stories. All eight stories featured
bad news but two stories were negatively framed, two stories were positively framed and the
other four were ambiguous (positively framed narration with negatively framed video and
vice versa). As predicted, men reported enjoying the negatively framed stories more than
women did (Kamhawi and Grabe 2008). Men also reported more appreciation of the quality
of the journalism and greater identification with the people featured in the negatively framed
stories than women did. These patterns were all reversed for the positively framed stories.2
The same experiment was used to test for gender differences in approach-avoidance as
manifested in the allocation of processing resources and levels of arousal (Grabe and
Kamhawi 2006). They predict that men would allocate more processing resources to
negatively framed stories than women do. They test this by measuring participants’
recognition memory and comprehension of the stories. As predicted, men scored
significantly higher on both recognition and comprehension of the negatively framed stories
than women did. The pattern was reversed for positively framed stories but was only
significant for comprehension.
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1
Note, though, that Grabe and Kamhawi (Grabe and Kamhawi 2006; Kamhawi and Grabe
2008) do not attribute the gender differences entirely to biological hardwiring. They
recognize that socialization may play a role in reinforcing biological predispositions.
2
As predicted, women reported greater enjoyment of the ambiguously framed stories than
men did as well as higher levels of identification with the main characters. They were also
generally more appreciative of the professionalism, objectivity and so on of these stories.
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Grabe and Kamhawi also predict that men will be more aroused by negative stories than
women are. As predicted, men rated the negatively framed stories significantly more
arousing than the positively framed stories. Women, on the other hand, reported higher
arousal for the positively framed stories than they did for the negatively framed ones.
However, contrary to predictions, there were no significant gender differences in reported
arousal for the negatively framed stories. Indeed, if anything, women reported higher arousal
than men.
A recent Dutch experiment also reports null findings. Kleemans and her colleagues (2012)
find no evidence of gender differences in preferences for negative news content. Participants
were shown four different news stories. Two stories were negative and two were neutral.3
After watching each story, participants were asked how likely they would be to change
channels if they had the opportunity. Once they had watched all four stories, they were
shown the introductory frames of pairs of the stories and asked which of each pair they
would choose to watch again. Neither the “staying tuned” measure nor the “choosing”
measure revealed significant differences between women and men in their preferences for
negative content.
The authors suggest that the null findings may be explained by the European practice of
including eyewitnesses and victims in news reports. They suggest that this practice serves to
“feminize” the news by emphasizing the human interest aspect and encouraging emotional
involvement in the news story through a less detached form of reporting (see van Zoonen
1998). The effect, they argue, may be to inhibit women’s avoidance response to negative
content.
The findings in the existing literature are thus somewhat mixed on whether there are gender
differences in reactions to negative news content. These mixed findings are partly a function
of the use of rather different dependent variables: self-reported arousal, “staying tuned,”
comprehension and memory, and so on. In this study, we focus on variables that more
directly capture the variables of interest—arousal and attention. We do so using
physiological measurements of skin conductance and heart rate.
Methodology
Our results are based on an experiment on the impact of negative versus positive television
content on a range of physiological indicators (Soroka, Nir and Fournier 2013).4 There are a
number of advantages to using psycho-physiological measurements to examine viewers’
responses to television news. They may be particularly useful when it comes to getting
information about emotional responses (see discussion in Ravaja 2004.) People may not be
consciously aware of their own responses, making their self-reports unreliable. Social
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3
The form of the stories was also varied. For each type of content, one story was produced
in a tabloid style while the other had a standard production style.
4
Note that the primary objective was not to examine gender differences in reactivity to
negative content, but all the experiments included both males and females. Our description
of the experiment draws on Soroka and McAdams (forthcoming).
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desirability bias may also inhibit accurate reporting of their internal states. Viewers, for
example, may be reluctant to admit to being aroused by watching portrayals of violent
behavior.5 As a result, the conclusions drawn from self-reports of arousal or attention may be
at odds with those based on physiological responses. Indeed, faced with such findings,
Balzer and Jacobs (2011) suggest that comparing self reported states with physiological
responses can provide insight into the role of socialization. Moreover, even when
physiological responses and self-reports prove to be equally strong predictors of behavior,
each type of measure can provide independent information.
Note that the gap between physiological responses and self-reports may be different for
women than for men. For instance, a tendency to under-report arousal (or over-report
disgust) after viewing violent images may be more prevalent for women, who are likely to
have been socialized to be less aggressive than men. We draw here in particular on Smith et
al. (2011), whose examination of disgust sensitivity and left-right political orientations finds
a gender difference in self-reports but not in physiological measures (see similar findings in
Rohrmann et al. 2008; Schienle et al. 2005.) The authors note that, “One possible
explanation of these results is that females claim to be more disgust sensitive because they
feel societal pressure to project sensitivity just as males report being less disgust sensitive
because they feel societal pressure to project toughness” (p. 5). The end result is that malefemale comparisons using self-reports may well reveal interesting consequences of
socialization and gender norms, but might also misstate actual gender differences in
reactions to news content.
There are other reasons that physiological measurements and self-reports may produce
different results. While self-reports can only be elicited after exposure to a stimulus, for
instance, physiological responses are measured continuously during actual exposure to the
stimulus. This yields a large number of real-time data points for analysis without interfering
with message processing (Ravaja 2004). But it also means that physiological measures are
capturing reactions at a different time than self-reports.
In short, there are good reasons to expect differences between our findings and previous
work based on self-reports. To the extent that arguments for media effects invoke biological
predispositions, or “hard wiring”, however, it seems appropriate to test them by measuring
their physiological implications. Variations in skin conductance, or electro-dermal activity,
can be used as a measure of arousal (Dawson, Schell and Filion 2007). Ravaja (2004)
characterizes electro-dermal activity as “an excellent operational definition of arousal” (p.
212) and its usefulness has been demonstrated in a number of studies of media effects
(Simons et al. 1999; Lang et al. 1999, 2000; Bolls et al. 2001). Heart rate is used as a
measure of attentiveness (Lang 1990, 1995; Mulder and Mulder 1981; see also review in
Ravaja 2004).
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5
A common way of measuring arousal is the Self Assessment Mannikin pictorial scale (see,
for example, Grabe and Kamhawi 2006). The scale shows illustrations of a manikin
displaying various levels of excitement ranging from bored-looking to a heart racing with
excitement.
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Experimental Design
Participants were recruited at McGill University. There were 38 females and 24 males.
Participants were told that they were taking part in an experiment about the news and that
their physiological responses would be monitored as they viewed a news program. They
watched the news program on their own, on a large computer monitor in a quiet room,
wearing noise-canceling headphones. Biosensors were placed on one hand, on their face, and
around their torso. These sensors captured their heart rate, skin conductance, respiration
amplitude, and activation of the corrugator and zygomaticus facial muscles. A ProComp
Infiniti encoder from Thought Technology Ltd. was used to capture physiological responses.
The experiments were run using custom-designed software developed for Soroka and
McAdams (forthcoming).
Table 1. Experimental Stimuli
Title
Description
Tone
Domestic Stories
Coder
Negativity
Participant
Negativity
(-2 to +2)
(1 to 7)
Canada
Magnotta
Serial killer is caught and returned to
Canada
negative
0.96
6.02
Lottery
Group of workers win lottery
positive
-1.06
1.88
Peru
Small town of Chimbote burns down
negative
1.07
5.05
May Day
May Day protests following economic
downturn
negative
0.58
4.42
Niger
Food Shortages in Niger
negative
1.26
5.61
UN Sri Lanka
UN investigations in war crimes in Sri
Lanka
negative
1.31
5.68
Gorillas
Gorillas released into wild
positive
-0.98
1.81
Folding Car
New electric, folding car intended to
reduce congestion
positive
-0.49
1.48
Young Director
11-yr old makes stop-motion films
positive
-1.23
1.25
positive
-0.68
1.59
International Stories
Cured Liver Disease Young child recovers from liver disease
The experiment lasted roughly 25 minutes, during which participants viewed seven news
stories on a variety of topics, including both political and general news. The stories were a
carefully selected (non-random) sample of real news stories from BBC World News. The
use of BBC News is based on the long-term objective of fielding the same experiment in
multiple countries.6 Two of the seven stories were domestic. One domestic news story was
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6
Replicating the experiment in multiple countries requires the use of a news source that is
familiar around the world. This long-term objective also informs our decision to include
domestic stories, alongside international ones, since viewers in different countries may
exhibit more or less interest in local versus international news.
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negative and the other was positive. The remaining five stories were all international stories
drawn from a sample of four positive and four negative stories. The stories ranged in tone
from very positive to very negative. Tone was measured in two ways: a second-by-second
coding conducted by three expert coders using a scale ranging from -2 (very positive) to +2
(very negative) and participants’ coding of the stories they viewed on a scale ranging from 1
(very positive) to 7 (very negative). The stories are listed in Table 1, along with short
descriptions and the average ratings of tone provided by the expert coders and the study
participants. Note that none of the stories were rated as being mildly negative or very
negative. This is important given Grabe and Kamhawi’s (2006) argument that moderately
negative news stories are the most likely to elicit gendered responses.
All participants viewed the two domestic stories plus five stories that were randomly
selected from the pool of eight international stories. The stories were presented in random
order, and separated by 40 seconds of grey screen. Note that the random selection of
international stories means that respondents saw varying numbers of positive and negative
stories – from two negative and five positive to five negative and two positive. After viewing
the stories, the participants completed a short survey.
Measuring Physiological Responses
We focus on a combination of skin conductance and heart rate. Variations in skin
conductance (SC) are used as an indicator of physiological arousal (Simons et al. 1999; Lang
et al. 1999; Bolls et al. 2001; see review in Ravaja 2004). SC reflects the level of moisture
exuded by the ecrine sweat glands. When we sweat the skin conducts electricity better.
Changes in the level of sweat are related to activity in the sympathetic branch of the
autonomic nervous system. It is important to note that arousal does not indicate anything
about the direction of the response; it simply indicates the degree of activation elicited by a
stimulus (Larsen and Diener 1992; Russell 1980). In other words, arousal is not the same as
valence. However, it serves our purpose by enabling us to measure whether positive or
negative stories elicit stronger reactions and whether these reactions are gendered.
Heart rate serves as a measure of attention. Attention is defined as “the allocation of limited
mental resources to a specific stimulus” (Ravaja 2004, 197). A decreasing heart rate is often
viewed as an indication of increasing attentiveness (Lang 1990; Mulder and Mulder 1981),
and that is how we use it below. That said, we note that heart rate likely reflects a
combination of attentiveness and arousal, where the former leads to deceleration while the
latter leads to acceleration. Our interpretation of heart rate (in line with Lang and others)
hinges on the assumption that whatever acceleration comes from arousal will be
overwhelmed by the deceleration that comes with attentiveness (see Potter and Bolls 2012
for a useful discussion). We thus expect participants’ heart rate to be lower when watching
negative stories, indicating greater attentiveness. Heart rate was measured using a blood
volume pulse sensor that detects variations in the volume of blood in the distal phalanx of
the middle finger as reflected in the amount of light transmitted through the finger tissue.
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Analyzing the Data
For skin conductance (SC) analyses, data are originally sampled 256 times per second, but
downsampled for analysis by taking averages over 125-ms intervals. The SC signal is
smoothed slightly for analysis, using Lowess smoothing with a bandwidth of .02. Skin
conductance measures can tend to decrease over the experiment (a consequence of
measurement issues with the electrodes). One option is to detrend the SC measure (see, for
example, Soroka and McAdams 2012); here, we simply include the impact of time in our
model. Heart rate is also downsampled to 125-ms intervals and Lowess-smoothed.
Past work using very similar data has included respondent dummy variables in the analysis.
These within-respondent ANOVAs have the advantage of filtering out the differences in skin
temperatures across respondents. Of course, the respondent dummies also capture many
other respondent characteristics, both demographic and attitudinal. Here, we care about these
respondent-level characteristics, in particular, gender. Rather than include respondent
dummies in our models, then, we use normalized measures of skin conductance and heart
rate. Normalized measures take, for each participant, (1) the raw measure, (2) subtract that
participant’s mean over the course of the experiment, and (3) divide the results by the
standard deviation over the course of the experiment. Results are in standard units, then, and
account not just for the fact that different respondents will have different levels of skin
conductance and different heart rates, but also different variances.
Results
We take two approaches to analyzing our results. First, we use relatively simple analyses of
covariance (ANCOVA) of SC, averaged over entire stories. Each respondent-story
combination is a case, and we are interested in the possibility that negative stories lead to
different levels of activation and attentiveness on the part of women and men than positive
stories. Second, we analyse our data in 5-second intervals. There is, as we shall see, real
variation in the tone of stories. We can (and do) capitalize on this variation by analyzing the
data in smaller intervals.
Story-Level Analysis
Our story-level analysis is relatively simple. We first model average SC as a function of the
following variables:
(1) an ordinal variable representing the order of presentation of the stories, to capture
the possibility that respondents’ reactions change based on the number of stories they
have seen thus far (1 to 7);
(2) a local dummy (local=1), to capture the possibility that domestic stories elicit
stronger reactions than international stories;
(3) an interval-level measure of negativity, based on the average of by-second tone of
stories (see the penultimate column of Table 1);
(4) a dummy variable (female=1) for participant sex;
(5) and a series of interactions allowing for variations in the impact of negativity
across variables 1 through 4.
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The results are shown in Table 2 and depicted graphically in Figure 1. The left panel in the
table presents the ANCOVA results, while the right panel shows the corresponding OLS
regression coefficients.
Table 2A. Story-level analyses: Skin Conductance
Model
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
ANCOVA
Partial SS
41.35
6.16
30.85
5.40
.02
.02
2.03
3.73
df
7
F
11.51***
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
12.01***
60.09***
10.51**
.05
.03
3.96*
7.27**
Residual
211.52
412
Total
252.88
419
N=420 * p < .05, ** p< .01, *** p < .001
OLS Regression
Raw Coefficient
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
.793 (.188)
.196 (.027)
-.116 (.035)
-.002 (.103)
-.026 (.143)
.363 (.110)
-.417 (.154)
Constant
R-squared
-1.008 (.145)
.163
As found in past research on responses to negative visual stimuli (see, for example, Soroka
and McAdams forthcoming; Soroka, Nir and Fournier 2013; Soroka 2014), negative stories
lead to higher average skin conductance levels (see Figure 1). This is the case for women
and men alike. The results are clear: women and men are equally aroused by negative
stories. We find no difference in activation between the sexes.
Table 2B. Story-level analyses: Heart rate
Model
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
ANCOVA
Partial SS
8.13
.21
7.44
.29
.03
.08
.03
.18
df
7
F
12.19***
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
2.23
78.12***
3.08
.29
.86
.35
1.89
Residual
39.16
411
Total
47.29
418
N=420 * p < .05, ** p< .01, *** p < .001
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OLS Regression
Raw Coefficient
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
-.032 (.081)
-.081 (.012)
.027 (.015)
.012 (.045)
-.057 (.062)
.026 (.047)
-.092 (.067)
Constant
R-squared
.258 (.063)
.172
The story for heart rate is a little different. As Table 2B shows, the interaction between
gender and negativity hints at a possible gender difference, though the coefficient is not
statistically significant. Figure 1 illustrates the gender difference that the estimates suggest:
women are somewhat more attentive to negative news stories than men. Indeed, men’s heart
rates appear to speed up, indicating that they become less attentive, whereas women
experience a small drop in heart rate, indicating greater attentiveness as they watch negative
stories.
Figure 1. Story-level analyses: The impact of tone on skin conductance and heart rate
That said, none of the interactions with gender in Tables 2A and 2B is statistically
significant. There is thus little evidence in these story-level data of gender differences in
reactions to positive and negative news. However, story-level data offer only a very broad
(noisy) view of physiological reactivity. And there are hints of a gender difference in
attentiveness. We therefore pursue this possibility further in more finely grained, higherfrequency data below.
5-second Analysis
Story-level analyses have the advantage of being relatively simple to estimate, but they mask
the fact there is a good deal of variation in tone within stories. Figure 2 shows 5-second
means of by-second tone, coded by and averaged across three expert coders. Vertical dashed
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lines show 95-percent confidence intervals, based on the three sets of codes. There are larger
confidence intervals as stories change tone — largely a consequence of coders selecting
slightly different seconds in which to change their codes. Even so, there are clear trends
within the articles. Positive stories tend to be positive most of the time; negative stories
similarly tend to be negative most of the time. But there are times when the tone is clearly
neutral in each.
Figure 2. Tone by Story
We can capitalize on this variation by analysing our data in 5-second intervals. (5-second
intervals are relatively common in the existing literature, since they tend to capture
physiological changes that may not be immediate.) Table 3 shows a re-estimation of our
models using these 5-second data. The structure of 5-second data requires a slightly different
specification. We move to a more dynamic measure of negativity —- here, changes in the
average by-second negativity in the current and preceding 5-second periods. The negativity
variable thus captures changes in a ten-second rolling average. We also add a variable
capturing within-story time (in 5-second intervals).
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The 5-second data produce rather more robust results. The most pertinent effects are
illustrated in Figure 3. The full ANCOVA and OLS results are presented in Table 3. The
heart rate results confirm what was hinted at in the story-level analyses.
Table 3A. 5-second interval-level analyses: Skin conductance
Model
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Time (5 Sec)
Time*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
ANCOVA
Partial SS
1318.15
46.74
750.27
84.43
232.63
14.29
3.50
.34
20.39
70.90
df
9
F
197.62***
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
63.06***
1013.16***
113.92***
313.89***
19.28***
4.73*
.45
27.51***
95.67***
Residual
8721.42
11768
Total
10039.57
11777
N=420 * p < .05, ** p< .01, *** p < .001
OLS Regression
Raw Coefficient
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Time (5 Sec)
Time*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
.254 (.023)
.131 (.004)
-.039 (.004)
-.014 (.001)
.004 (.001)
-.035 (.016)
-.010 (.014)
.104 (.020)
-.166 (.017)
Constant
R-squared
-.343 (.026)
.131
Table 3B. 5-second interval-level analyses: Heart rate
ANCOVA
Partial SS
df
F
Model
230.49
9
59.01
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Time (5 Sec)
Time*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
3.19
215.74
9.92
6.64
1.44
.87
2.08
3.55
.98
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
1
7.35**
497.08***
22.86***
15.30***
3.32
.35
4.80*
8.17**
2.26
Residual
5058.50
11655
Total
5288.99
11664
N=420 * p < .05, ** p< .01, *** p < .001
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OLS Regression
Raw Coefficient
Negative tone
Order
Order*Negative
Time (5 Sec)
Time*Negative
Female
Female*Negative
Local
Local*Negative
-.022 (.018)
-.071 (.003)
.013 (.003)
-.002 (.001)
-.001 (.001)
-.078 (.013)
-.025 (.011)
-.044 (.015)
-.020 (.013)
Constant
R-squared
.292 (.020)
.043
Negativity is positively related to increased skin conductance and, once again, this is the
case regardless of sex (see Table 3A). Moreover, the relationship holds equally strongly for
women and men. In other words, women are just as aroused as men by watching negative
news stories. On the other hand, women clearly pay more attention to negative news stories
than men do. Their heart rates decreased significantly as they viewed negative news stories.
There is no evidence of a similar drop for men. On the contrary, if anything, men’s heart
rates speed up as they watch the negative news stories, indicating a lower level of
attentiveness. In short, the key gender difference in reactions to negative news relates to
women’s apparently heightened attentiveness to negative content. There is no evidence of
any gender difference in arousal.
Figure 3. 5-second analyses: The impact of tone on skin conductance and heart rate
Conclusions
It is not clear why gender differences appear for attentiveness but not for arousal. The
finding that women react more strongly to negative information does fit with a (small)
literature on gender and negativity biases, however. Work in psychology suggests that
women have a stronger avoidance response to negative stimuli than do men (see, for
example, Canli et al. 2002). Research on impression formation also finds evidence of a
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stronger negativity bias for women (Ito and Cacioppo 2005; though see Huma 2010 for a
related discussion). This is mirrored in work in political behavior as well – drawing on
models of impression formation, Soroka (2014) finds that women exhibit a stronger
negativity bias in their assessments of US presidents. Work in economics also finds gender
differences in risk aversion: in a meta-analysis of experimental studies, Croson and Gneezy
(2009) find evidence that women are more risk averse than men are. However, research on
impression formation and loss aversion cannot distinguish between attentiveness and arousal.
The particular difference between the two that we find here is neither contrary to, nor
supported by, this previous work. But there are already strong hints of a larger negativity
bias for women than for men, and this finds some support above.
There may be neuro-physiological bases for the gender difference in attentiveness to
negative news that we have observed. A study using functional magnetic resonance imaging
reports women activated the anterior cingulate, a region known to integrate attention and
emotion, when presented with affectively negative visual stimuli (Wrase et al. 2003). There
was no evidence of a comparable activation for men. Another study based on the use of
steady-state probe topography (SSPT) finds that the processing of unpleasant images
(relative to neutral images) is associated with latency reductions within the right frontal and
temporal regions in women but not in men (Kemp et al. 2004). Latency refers to the time
taken for an electrical impulse to travel from a visual stimulus to the site where the recording
is taking place and is typically taken as an indicator of the speed of processing neural
information. Kemp and his colleagues suggest that the frontal latency reductions observed in
women may reflect “an inability to successfully suppress activation associated with the
presentation of unpleasant stimuli” (p. 641).
Note that our finding that women are more attentive to negative news stories than men is at
odds with Grabe and Kamhawi’s (2006) predictions, and does not square with their finding
that men received higher scores for comprehension and memory recognition of negatively
framed stories than women did. This may be a function of differences in the design of our
respective experiments. First, Grabe and Kamhawi only examined whether men are more
aroused by and attentive to moderately negative news stories than women are. They assume
that gendered responses to negative news are most likely to appear when the story is not too
negative but nonetheless unambiguously negative: stories that are very negative are unlikely
to elicit different responses from women and men because they create a ceiling effect with
women and men alike manifesting an avoidance response whereas stories that are only
mildly negative are unlikely to induce much of a response in either gender. This implies a
non-linear relationship between negativity and arousal. Our preliminary tests find no
evidence of a non-linear relationship, however, and so we focus on a simple linear effect.
Second, while all of the stories used in Grabe and Kamhawi’s experiments featured bad
news, some were framed positively or ambiguously while others were framed negatively.
Our study, on the other, hand, includes stories featuring good news as well as bad.
Third, and perhaps most importantly, the difference in findings may also reflect differences
in the way that we measure attentiveness. As discussed above, we capture attentiveness in
real time by measuring how participants’ heart rates vary as they watch positive and negative
news stories, whereas Grabe and Kamhawi focus on recognition memory and
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comprehension. Variations in heart rate simply reflect the allocation of information
processing resources; they do not tell us anything about the application of those resources to
encoding (recognition memory) and retrieving (comprehension) information. One possibility
is that negative stories tend to elicit different emotions from women and men (see below)
and these emotions influence how story content is encoded and retrieved. At this stage,
however, this is purely speculative. Understanding why gender appears to condition these
measures in different—indeed, apparently opposite—ways may require experiments that
incorporate all three types of measurement.
Our finding that women are more attentive than men to negative news stories also raises
interesting questions about how attentiveness translates into actual behavior. As we saw
above, there is abundant evidence that women consume less news than men do, and it is
plausible that the dominance of negative news helps to explain this gender difference. Our
experiment puts women in a situation where they get to watch negative news stories,
whether they enjoy them or not. In this situation, they appear to be more attentive to the
stories than men are. Outside the lab7, where they have the choice to watch or not, they may
simply choose not to watch the news. We can only speculate about the reasons why
women’s immediate psycho-physiological reactions and their long-term behavioral
responses to negative news are different. One possibility is that, because they are greatly
affected by (but dislike) negative information, and because they know that political news is
predominantly negative, women avoid political news. Hyper-reaction to negativity thus
produces a withdrawal. Alternatively, women’s behavior may reflect their socialization. In
avoiding negative news when they have the option, women may be acting in accord with
deeply socialized gender role expectations. As noted above, using physiological responses in
tandem with self-reports can provide new insights into the interplay between biological
predispositions and learned ones.
At the same time, though, we need to recognize an important limitation of relying on
measurements of psycho-physiological responses. They do not permit us to identify the
emotion that has triggered an increase in skin conductance or a slowing down of the heart
rate (see Dawson, Schell and Filion 2007). Physiological responses to negative news could
reflect fear, anger, anxiety or disgust. Differentiating these emotional responses requires
experiments that systematically manipulate the news coverage to elicit specific emotions.
Women and men appear to be equally aroused by watching negative news stories, whether
arousal is measured by self-reports as in Grabe and Kamhawi’s (2006) experiment or by
changes in skin conductance levels as in our experiment. It is quite possible, though, that
viewing negative news content is exciting for men but induces anxiety in women. In other
words, the emotions are different even though the level of arousal is similar. This is another
possible explanation for why their behavioral responses differ.
This study represents the first that we are aware of that uses physiological measures to
examine gendered responses to television news content. There is clearly a great deal more
work that needs to be done if we are to come up with a compelling explanation of why
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7
Our participants were free, of course, to withdraw from the experiment at any time without
prejudice.
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women typically consume less news than men, however. Uncovering answers is important
given the enduring gender gap in political knowledge. Women typically know less about
politics than men do, even taking account of gender differences in the propensity to guess
and other measurement artifacts (see, for example, Delli Carpini and Keeter 2000; Dolan
2011; Dow 2009; Frazer and Macdonald 2003; Gidengil et al. 2004; Mondak and Anderson
2004). Being uninformed or, worse, misinformed about politics impairs women’s ability to
voice their needs and wants effectively. One reason women know less about politics than
men do is that they consume less news. Finding ways of countering the gender gap in news
consumption could therefore help to close the knowledge gap but that can only happen if we
understand why women consume less news.!
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15!
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