Download Study assumptions Visual-verbal competition Remoteness

7/2/2014
Study assumptions
“Powerful and Emotional” Pictures in Television News:
Effects on Viewer Comprehension and Political Evaluation
Erik Bucy
College of Media and Communication
Texas Tech University
•
Humans neurologically wired
for visual processing
•
Leadership has a large
nonverbal component
– Dominant form of learning
– Effective leaders have an
‘attention binding’ quality
– In the full motion video era,
character traits are visually
manifested
Jacob Groshek
College of Communication
Boston University
• HDTV, YouTube…
•
Presented to the American Association of Public Opinion Research
Anaheim, CA
Visuals contribute to political
learning, knowledge
– Readily encoded and easily
retrieved from memory
• Visual knowledge, visual
primacy
May 18, 2014
Visual-verbal competition
• Expressive leader displays
within newscasts evoke a
range of affective and
evaluative responses
– Both favorable and
unfavorable
– Affecting viewer
perceptions and attitudes
• Whether the leader’s voice is
heard or overlaid with a
reporter’s narration
Remoteness of verbals
•
Text (and speech) is
experientially remote
–
•
Requires mastery of an
abstract symbol system
(alphabet, language)
But, when there’s a contest
between visuals and
verbals
–
You almost always find
better memory for the visuals
• Distinction between
sound and image bites
– Both present in newscasts
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Visual primacy
• Visual primacy occurs
when there are
mismatches between the
visuals and verbals
Image handling
•
– Viewers more likely to
remember the images
– Also known as ‘audiovisual
redundancy’
– “You guys in television-land
haven’t figured it out yet, have
you? When the pictures are
powerful and emotional, they
override if not completely
drown out the sound. Lesley, I
mean it, nobody heard you.”
• Famous CBS news report
by Lesley Stahl
– Oct. 1984: Reagan reeleciton campaign against
Walter Mondale
– Critical voiceover, but
positive images
• White House calls to thank
Stahl for her report
Audiovisual redundancy
• Degree of informational or
semantic correspondence
between the audio and
visual track of news
– High correspondence
• Visuals and verbals
mutually reinforcing, an
“exact match”
– Low correspondence
• Visuals suggestive of the
words spoken, a “close
match”
– Conflicting
• Visuals contradictory or
completely unrelated to
words spoken
Dick Darman to Lesley Stahl
after airing of a ‘critical’ report
about the Reagan team’s
image management strategies
Deputy Chief of Staff, Reagan White
House, 1984
•
Image handlers, campaign
mgrs
– Operate under the assumption
that visuals are important
Audiovisual redundancy
• As A/V redundancy
increases, amount of
cognitive capacity
required to process a
message decreases
– Viewers seem to treat the
audio and video
presentation as a single
source
– Memory and
understanding improve
• Recognition memory, free
recall, story
comprehension
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Audiovisual redundancy
Research expectations
• Consistent with
visual primacy, we
expect that:
• With low redundancy,
message treated as two
separate info streams
– Recognition memory
will be worse for the
A/V condition, better
for audio, transcriptonly
– Emotional and
evaluative selfreports: most
favorable in the video
only condition
– Competition for attention
ensues
• Memory for verbals
suffers as a result
• Story comprehension
should be lower
– Processing of audio is
resource intensive
compared to visuals
• Important to understand
cognitive processing as
a limited capacity
operation
•
Findings
Study design
• ‘Channel study’ design
• 4-group between
subjects experiment
–
–
–
–
Full audio-video
Video only
Audio only
Transcript only (control)
• Participants
–
N = 242 college students in
comm’s courses
• 73.1% females; avg. age
22
• 53.5% Repub, 20.4%
Dem, 26.1% Ind
(distributed equally across
genders)
• Received extra credit for
participating
• Online experiment
– Pre-/post-test design
– Each subject saw one
version of the Stahl story
• Outcome measures
– Leader evaluations
• Trait measures
– Emotional and evaluative
self reports
– Knowledge gain
– Comprehension
• Additionally, focus groups
were run
– Stahl report was shown, nonleading questions asked about
what stood out
followed by the A/V
condition and then
audio only and
transcript
Comprehension Coding
• Followed Robinson
& Levy’s (1986)
approach in The
Main Source
• Question asks R’s
– What’s the main point
of the story?
•
•
•
•
0-8 scale
5 = they
understood/articulated
the main point
1-4 = individual facts
about the story
6-8 = main point +
individual facts
• Coding examples:
–
–
–
1 = This story is about
highlighting Ronald Reagan's
successful career while in and
out of the White House.
5 = I think this story is about
how Reagan was a
president…seen in a very good
light in the public eye, with a lot
of help from the media.
7 = this story is about how Mr
Reagan is using the media – the
aim to using television is to
erase the president's negative
influence.
•
•
•
the aides often using the
helicopter engines to avoid bad
questions.
the president sometimes using
skills to answer the question,
such as focusing from the
details of an unpopular issue, to
a popular subject.
there's a lot of evidence that the
American people don't care if
Mr Reagan makes mistakes
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Story Comprehension
Findings
(“main point” plus)
Recognition memory (knowledge index)
F (242, 3) = 14.01, p < .000
F (238, 3) = 23.8, p < .000
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3.5
Comprehension
3
2.5
2
1.5
1
0.5
0
Video Only
Full A/V
Audio Only
Transcript
(range = 0-11)
Findings
Findings
Reagan thermometer scale
Trait evaluations
(pre/post-test)
Reagan credibility
Reagan trustworthy
F(238,3)=3.51, p=.016
F(238,3)=3.45, p=.017
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Findings
Findings
Trait evaluations
Viewer enthusiasm towards Reagan
Reagan compassionate
Reagan informed
Interested
Bored
F(238,3)=2.97, p=.032
F(238,3)=3.43, p=.018
F(238,3)=3.05, p=.029
F(238,3)=4.79, p=.003
Findings
Findings
Viewer enthusiasm towards Reagan
Viewer reactions to news report
(The story makes me feel…)
Enthusiastic
Confident
In the know
Skeptical
F(238,3)=.582, n.s.
F(238,3)=.806, n.s.
F(238,3)=3.73, p=.012
F(238,3)=2.85, p=.038
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•
•
Findings
Findings
Focus group comments
Focus group comments
“I paid more attention to the
images on the screen than I did
what she was saying. He’s
always smiling; images were
strong that Reagan was a good
guy.” - Danielson
• On the other hand, some
viewers were skeptical of
Reagan’s portrayal
•
didn’t even take questions, instead
he just gave some dumb, witty
comment and brushed it off. And
running around with his shirt off at
the beach--to me it’s just
ridiculous.
He uses his charm to avoid
answering questions. Did you see
the amount of American flags in
that? They made him look good.
Republicans would love him… he
is really charming and full of
personality and life.” - Malat
“It made him look good…it’s
because he has a good
personality. They showed
Reagan avoiding questions but
he did it in a joking way… he
laughed it off as no big deal.
That gave me the feeling that it
was no big deal as well. If he
would have acted nervous, it
would have mad me think
something was up.” - Dubin
Preliminary conclusions
•
Viewers clearly regard full A/V
as informative and credible
•
– respond positively to it
•
The transcript-only condition
resulted in the most criticism
– Much more so than audio only
– Professional voiceover of
audio makes them feel clever,
confident, ‘in the know’
– In print, negativity comes
across loud and clearer
Text only offers no nonverbal
signals and makes news
framing most obvious
– These framing effects produce
negative evaluations of
Reagan
– At the same time, it’s also
easier to learn from text
(knowledge index scores)
Video only does not produce
positive evaluations, as
expected
– Instead, it’s disorienting and
confusing
– Viewers want a narrative!
•
“[It] seemed like he was acting; he
• If you take the time to read…
•
Suggests there are important
differences between visual and
verbal framing
– And that, consistent with
Darman’s hunch, in the nightly
TV competition for viewer
attention, the visual wins out
Future directions
• Considering redundancy
as a dynamic feature of
messages that varies over
time
– Time dependent rather than
message dependent
– Look at variable A/V
redundancy in news
coverage across elections
• Other features of
messages that may
impact processing
– Affective content: emotional
tone, image intensity, quality
of nonverbal display
– Editing or “structural”
features: pacing, visual
complexity, information
packaging or graphication
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Thank you.
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