The Effects of Emotional Pictures in Television News

Abstract

Visual illustrations accompanying television news broadcasts are often hypothesized to increase viewers' recall of news items. A review of reported studies, however, yields mixed results for this notion. The present article argues that effects of emotional visuals are reflected not in the exact recall of the text but through specific kinds of errors in recall and the relation of these errors to certain parts of the item. These errors occur because emotional visuals focus attention on specific parts of a news item, and that recall of the item is reconstructed from perceptual judgements that are generalized from these specific parts. Results of an experiment (N = 125) supported the hypothesized effects.