Do emotions conquer facts? A CCME model for the impact of emotional information on implicit attitudes in the post-truth era

This study aimed to examine the influence of emotional media information on information-processing mechanisms in the current post-truth era. A cognitive conflict monitoring and evaluation

(CCME) model was proposed to explore news audiences’ attention and implicit attitudes. The study had a 2 (information type, emotional vs. neutral) × 2 (condition, compatible vs.

incompatible) × 3 (electrode position: Fz vs. Cz vs. Pz) design, and an implicit association test (IAT) was administered, with event-related potential (ERP) data collected. The results

revealed that emotional information evoked different information-processing mechanisms than neutral information. First, in the early conflict-monitoring stage, emotional information altered

arousal, and more attentional resources were allocated to semantic processing. Second, in the late evaluation stage, the lack of attentional resources (due to prior allocation) reduced the

late-stage evaluation of the target stimuli by participants. Thus, in this post-truth era, attentional resources may be exhausted by processing emotional information in unnecessary media

cues irrelevant to facts, inducing early cognitive conflict and prolonged late-stage evaluation of news articles.

Emotions, particularly negative emotions and counterarguing (Lang et al., 1988; Nabi and Myrick, 2018; Lillie et al., 2021), are constantly used in persuasive communication and have been

equated with information (Kunda, 1987, 1990; Schwarz, 2010), which influences audiences’ attitudes toward news reports at different cognitive stages.

The post-truth era is characterized by valuing emotions over facts, bias over objectivity, and attitudes over truth (Higgins, 2016; Zhang, 2017; Rochlin, 2017; Gewin et al., 2017),

suggesting that emotional information has a greater influence than objective facts on personal attitudes, networked subjectivity, and public opinion (Keyes, 2004; Harsin, 2015; Midgley,

2016; Boler and Davis, 2018), thereby enhancing existing dogmatic beliefs (Ashton and Craft, 2021), leading to increasing fractionation of the online public sphere (Lewandowsky et al., 2017;

Thorson, 2016), and a precipitous decline in media credibility (Keyes, 2004; Roberts, 2010; Bounegru, 2017).

In the post-truth communication environment, emotion is not only personal information but also social information (Van Kleef, 2009; Liu and Fu, 2022), with audiences influenced by external

emotional input; information processing relies on the comprehensiveness and depth of processing of emotional claims. On the social level, emotional expressions represent and reproduce social

and structural bias (Zembylas, 2020) and have a visibly determinant role in the media influence of individuals (Boler and Davis, 2018). Recent neurocognitive studies have also revealed the

influence of effect on complex cognitive tasks such as truth discernment (Van Bavel and Pereira, 2018; Paul et al., 2020).

As mentioned above, affective responses and cognitive processes interact, and to a large extent, the processing of emotional information occurs before and influences factual information in

the post-truth communication environment. While a wide range of studies has utilized the term “post-truth era”, the precise nature of this era, including its advent and formation, is still a

matter of debate, and the mechanism influencing audience cognitive processing has yet to be explored by communication researchers. A few studies have suggested that these two kinds of

information exhibit opposite patterns in terms of their time course and neurocognitive basis of influences on audiences’ attitudes. To probe this question, the study utilized the implicit

association test (IAT) and event-related potentials (ERPs) to elucidate the characteristics of the post-truth era and refine the related theories.

Audience attitude is a critical concept in media psychology that generally includes three components: affect, behavior, and cognition. In cognitive psychology, the IAT is commonly used to

measure the audience’s implicit attitudes, which are unconscious and accumulated from one’s past experiences and present feelings; these attitudes, to some extent, can affect one’s

predispositions, emotional tendencies, and behaviors toward social matters (Greenwald and Banaji, 1995; Luo et al., 2006; Xu and Zhang, 2009, 2011).

Event-related potentials (ERPs), such as the N2 and N400 (negative peaks that occur 200–350 ms and approximately 400 ms after stimulus onset) and the late positive potential (LPP), are

observed in electroencephalography (EEG) data, which have a high temporal resolution; these ERPs represent an ideal cortical activity measurement for investigating cognitive processing

stages (Martin-Loeches et al., 2001; Hinojosa et al., 2001; Hauk et al., 2006). Previous research has revealed that emotion can enhance attention and medial frontal negativity changes in

association with emotion-influenced decision-making (Huang and Luo, 2004). However, there is a paucity of research on the speed of negative bias development and the stages of information

processing that these biases manifest (Smith et al., 2003).

To this end, the present study applied cognitive neuroscience research methods to analyze the implicit attitudes of audiences and influencing factors; specifically, we collected EPR data

while participants read emotionally charged articles, which are prevalent in the post-truth era. This study addressed the research question of whether there are differences in audience

information-processing mechanisms between reading neutral news articles and news articles with emotional content. If so, then this difference should be reflected in brain activity during the

IAT (Friese et al., 2011). We hypothesize that in the post-truth era, audience attentional resources are depleted by the emotional content in news reports that affect implicit attitudes; if

so, the N2 and N400 amplitudes will be larger. Furthermore, the collection of ERP data during the IAT was used to disentangle the two stages of emotional information processing. The aim of

this study was to explore audience cognitive conflict monitoring and evaluation of emotional information to develop a two-stage model and examine the mechanism by which emotion (as social

information) influences the audience in the post-truth communication environment.

The experiment recruited 44 undergraduate and graduate students from local universities and randomly divided them into two groups: an experimental group (24 participants, 12 males, Mage = 

22.13 ± 1.94 years) and a control group (20 participants, 9 males, Mage = 23.20 ± 2.19 years). All the participants were right-handed, had normal or corrected-to-normal vision, and majored

in fields not related to psychology. No participants had a history of neurological or psychiatric illness or took medication that would affect their nervous system. The participants

completed the Chinese version of the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), and the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) (as shown in Table 1); there was

not a significant difference in positive [t (42) = 1.314, p = 0.196] or negative affect [t (42) = 1.224, p = 0.228] between the two groups before the experiment. All participants signed

informed consent before the experiments and were paid after participation. The experimental procedures were approved by the Institutional Review Board of the School of Journalism and

Communication, Beijing Normal University and were performed in compliance with the principles of the Declaration of Helsinki.

A variety of articles on popular media topics were presented to participants in a pilot test, including one on genetically modified foods (GMFs). This topic was eventually selected, as

scientific debate can trigger emotions, and personal feelings come into play when discussing controversial scientific issues (Scheufele and Krause, 2019; Neil et al., 2018; Gewin et al.,

2017). The news topic selected was GMFs, which have long been at the center of the “post-science” (Iyengar and Massey, 2019; George, 2013) controversy in China and worldwide and is an

example case in which truth and facts are obscured by controversy and strong emotional reactions.

In the present study, the two groups were asked to read two stimuli materials: a news article with neutral content and a news article with emotional content. The neutral news report was an

unbiased article introducing the national compulsory labeling of GMFs, which contained 1369 Chinese characters, while the emotional news article was consistent with the argument in the

neutral article but modified to contain more emotional expressions, with a total of 1343 characters. All the materials were printed on A4 paper, with a standard size of 210 mm × 297 mm.

The whole experiment lasted approximately 10 min. Before the experiment, the participants were given 3 min to relax (resting state). In the experiment, they were instructed to read the news

article in detail and complete a questionnaire related to its content as a manipulation check. The reading time was approximately 4 min. After the experiment, participants were given another

3-min break to return to baseline emotional status.

After reading the materials, the participants completed the IAT, which was divided into five phases (Huijding et al., 2005). First, attribute words with positive and negative meanings were

presented on the screen, and participants pressed keyboard buttons in response. For positive words, they pressed “F”, and for negative words, they pressed “J”. Second, there was a practice

phase in which target words and attribute words were both presented on the screen. For positive attribute words, the participants pressed “F”, and for negative attribute words and target

words, they pressed “J”. Third, in the sorting phase, the target words and attribute words were presented again, and the participants sorted them as in the second phase. Fourth, in the

reverse practice phase, the target words and attribute words were both presented, but (in contrast to the second and third phases), the participants were instructed to press “F” for target

words and positive attribute words and to press “J” for negative attribute words. Fifth, in the reverse sorting phase, the target words and attribute words were presented again, and the

participants sorted them according to the rules in the fourth phase. The third and fifth phases were the formal experimental phases, with all types of words appearing at random for a total

of 60 times, while in the practice phases, all types of words appeared at random for a total of 20 times.

To offset the influence of the word order, the order of phases with the first rule (second and third phases) and the second rule (fourth and fifth phases) was counterbalanced among the

participants (Huijding et al., 2005; Xu and Zhang, 2009). In the IAT, the differences in reaction times (RTs) to the target words and the ERP data in the third and fifth phases were taken to

indicate the participants’ attitude bias toward the stimuli. For instance, RTs are shorter for congruent (strongly associated) words (hereafter, positive association) than for incongruent

(not strongly associated) words (hereafter, negative association), which can reveal participants’ unconscious attitudes or preferences.

In the experiment, 10 target words and 20 attribute words (with equal numbers of positive and negative words) were presented. The valence of the attribute words was recorded on a 7-point

Likert scale (ranging from 1=negative to 7=positive). Twenty participants were asked to evaluate the material. Positive attribute words and negative attribute words differed significantly in

valence [t (38) = 18.36, p