Viewers viewed: facial expressions while watching TV news
F.S. Schwab, D.U. Unz and P.W. Winterhoff-Spurk
Media & Organizational Psychology, University of Saarland, Saarbruecken, Germany
Because facial expressions naturally accompany an emotional process, they can be valuable, observable indicators of otherwise unobservable processes. Based on an interest in the emotional processes that occur while people watch violent events on TV news, we analysed their facial expressions alongside other emotional components.
Our poster describes the methods and findings of this project: “Violence in TV news – on the cultivation of emotions”. The development of a timeline-oriented system to conduct a computer-assisted media analysis (CAMA) is outlined. This allows us to ‘sketch out’ studies on the presentation of violent events in TV news by describing the formats and content of each news item along the timeline. A content analysis of the main news programmes of both public and commercial television channels in Germany was conducted, using four time samples (1981, 1996, 1998 and 2000).
The results of these media content analyses are used to conduct studies about the facial expressions (EmFACS; Ekman & Friesen 1978, 1982) of viewers to TV news. Investigations combine both sets of timeline data (using a split-screen videomixer) and display a timecode on the recorded video. By means of this technique, we explore the process of media reception. Overall, we find typical patterns of facial expressions, but with a remarkably high proportion of contempt (e.g. spite, scorn, disrespect) and specific action-unit-combinations (i.e. muscular facial behavior patterns which, while not denoting any particular emotion, are repeatedly displayed). Differences can be observed in the emotional process of media reception of violent and non-violent news, and there are differences in facial expression while watching violent and non-violent items. Furthermore, there seems to be a connection between the presentation of violent TV news events and the expressive reaction of the viewer.
Supported by the Deutsche Forschungs-Gesellschaft, DFG.
Paper presented at Measuring Behavior 2002 , 4th International Conference on Methods and Techniques in Behavioral Research, 27-30 August 2002, Amsterdam, The Netherlands