Picture This: The Influence of Emotionally Valenced Images, On Attention, Selection, and Sharing of Social Media News

ABSTRACT

Social media platforms have become the primary conduits to news for many consumers, yet little is known about how the content in social media posts is viewed and evaluated by consumers or how it shapes their decisions about selecting and sharing this information. A within-subjects eye-tracking experiment (N = 60), was conducted to examine the influence of image presence and valence on attention to and engagement with news stories on social media. Participants viewed a series of 29 social media posts of news stories, each of which was either paired with no image, a positively valenced image, or a negatively valenced image. Participants attention to the images was captured via eye tracking, and they answered dependent measures to gauge level of emotion and arousal, and intention to click and share. The results show that posts containing positive images elicited a higher level of visual attention than those with negative or no images, which led to higher intentions to click and share posts with positive images. The results provide a deeper understanding of the importance of images in driving news consumption, and offer practical implications for journalists, news organizations and groups using social media to spread a message.

Notes

1. Positive, negative, and no-image versions were crafted for each of the 29 stories, and each participant viewed an even mix of the three post types. Participants were assigned to one of three between-subjects permutations, with different third of the stories to each (positive, negative, and neutral) condition. One condition had stories 1-10 negative, stories 11-20 as positive, and stories 21-29 as neutral, another condition would have 1-10 as neutral, 11-20 as negative and 21-29 as positive, and the third completed the balanced design. The actual order of presentation of the posts was algorithmically randomized.