Effects of Arousing Visuals and Redundancy on Cognitive Assessment of Television News

This investigation examined the effects of arousing visuals and audiovisual redundancy on viewers' cognitive assessment of television news stories. Four dimensions of thoughts—salience, polarity, originality, and emotionality—were analyzed. Results showed that redundancy had main effects on all four dimensions, whereas arousing visuals affected two. It is argued that the introduction of emotional arousal in redundancy research, though complicating, paints a fuller picture of the phenomenon, and the study of these mental thought processes offers an alternative approach to the traditional attention and memory measures. Implications are discussed regarding redundancy research and appraisal of emotional stimuli.

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