The Influence of Emotional Schema and Color Congruency on the Trustworthiness of News
Published in Capstone Program, Department of Psychology, National ChengChi University, Taipei, Taiwan, 2022
Keywords: Emotion valance, Color schema, Schema priming, Schema congruity theory, News Trustworthiness
Our study investigates how the emotional valence embedded in news headlines, the primary color of the news anchor’s cloth, and the congruency between the emotional color scheme and the anchor’s clothing affect people’s trust in the news credibility.
This study includes both a pre-test and a formal experiment. The pre-test consists of two parts: in part one, participants match certain colors to specific emotions, while in part two, they match news titles to emotions, rate the difficulty of understanding the titles, and assess the trustworthiness of the news.We then filtered two positive emotions (safe, lively) and two negative emotions (indifferent, dangerous), selecting ten news titles for each based on the difficulty rating.In the formal experiment, 40 news titles selected based on pre-test results are presented with an anchor wearing either a blue or red outfit, resulting in 80 trials.
A three-way ANOVA revealed the main effects of the primary color (the anchor’s clothing) and the emotional valence of the news titles. For the main color, anchors wearing blue were associated with significantly higher ratings of news trustworthiness compared to those wearing red. Regarding emotional valence, positive news received significantly higher trustworthiness ratings than negative news. In addition, there are interactions between the aforementioned variables. For positive emotions, there is an emotional color schema congruency effect. The color blue, associated with a soothing schema, makes the trust reduction caused by schema incongruency less pronounced. For negative emotional news, a floor effect was observed, meaning that regardless of schema congruency or the color of the clothing, participants’ distrust in negative news remained unaffected. There is also an interaction between the anchor’s clothing color and its congruency with the emotional color schema. The results show that only when the anchor is wearing red does the trust level significantly increase in cases where the color of the emotional schema and the anchor’s clothing are congruent, compared to when they are incongruent.
Recommended citation: Chu, M.-Y., Yen, N.-S.. The Influence of Emotional Schema and Color Congruency on the Trustworthiness of News [Poster presentation]. Capstone Program, Department of Psychology, National ChengChi University, Taipei, Taiwan.
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