Men and Women Read News Differently

This study explored how the structure of written news affects men and women differently in terms of cognition. In a 2 (Structure) × 2 (Story) × 2 (Sex) mixed design, participants read two inverted pyramid and two chronological news stories, each on a different topic. Dependent measures included secondary task reaction times (STRTs), cued recall, recognition accuracy, and text comprehension. Women had slower reaction times than men across stories, but a significant interaction showed their use of cognitive resources was less affected by variations in story structure. These results are discussed in the context of a comprehensibility interpretation of the STRT measure. The findings suggest that the common use of the inverted pyramid structure, which has been criticized as difficult to comprehend, may not explain the decrease in female news readers.

[1]  Arthur C. Graesser,et al.  Use of Cognitive Capacity in Reading: Effects of Some Content Features of Text. , 1983 .

[2]  L. Hedges,et al.  Sex differences in mental test scores, variability, and numbers of high-scoring individuals. , 1995, Science.

[3]  David H. Weaver,et al.  Newspaper Readership Patterns , 1978 .

[4]  M. Chiu,et al.  Gender, Context, and Reading: A Comparison of Students in 43 Countries , 2006 .

[5]  Edna F. Einsiedel,et al.  Newspaper Use by Working and Non-Working Women , 1981 .

[6]  Stan Ketterer.  NRJ Research in Brief: Women Perceive Crime Stories as More Disturbing Than Do Men , 2002 .

[7]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using multivariate statistics, 5th ed. , 2007 .

[8]  J. Elkins,et al.  Journal of Adolescent and Adult Literacy , 2001 .

[9]  Julia T. Wood.  Gendered Lives: Communication, Gender, and Culture , 1993 .

[10]  A. Mammucari,et al.  Evidence for sex differences in brain organization in recovery in aphasia , 1985, Brain and Language.

[11]  Annie Lang,et al.  Effects of chronological presentation of information on processing and memory for broadcast news , 2009 .

[12]  Karl J. Friston,et al.  Cerebral Asymmetry and the Effects of Sex and Handedness on Brain Structure: A Voxel-Based Morphometric Analysis of 465 Normal Adult Human Brains , 2001, NeuroImage.

[13]  Stan Ketterer.  Women Perceive Crime Stories as More Disturbing Than Do Men. (Research in Brief) , 2002 .

[14]  Bruce K. Britton,et al.  Effects of Text Organization on Memory: Test of a Cognitive Effort Hypothesis with Limited Exposure Time. , 1986 .

[15]  Rasha Kamhawi,et al.  Hard Wired for Negative News? Gender Differences in Processing Broadcast News , 2006, Commun. Res..

[16]  W. Kintsch.  The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: a construction-integration model. , 1988, Psychological review.

[17]  F. Schachter,et al.  Do girls talk earlier?: Mean length of utterance in toddlers. , 1978 .

[18]  Andrew R. A. Conway,et al.  On the capacity of attention: Its estimation and its role in working memory and cognitive aptitudes , 2005, Cognitive Psychology.

[19]  Eddy J. Davelaar,et al.  Individual differences in semantic short-term memory capacity and reading comprehension , 2003 .

[20]  D. Geary.  Male, Female: The Evolution of Human Sex Differences , 1998 .

[21]  J. Stroop.  Studies of interference in serial verbal reactions. , 1992 .

[22]  Byungho Park,et al.  Parsing the Resource Pie: Using STRTs to Measure Attention to Mediated Messages , 2006 .

[23]  L. Katz,et al.  Sex differences in the functional organization of the brain for language , 1995, Nature.

[24]  Bruce K. Britton,et al.  Effects of prior knowledge on use of cognitive capacity in three complex cognitive tasks. , 1982 .

[25]  William H. Bommer,et al.  Sex Differences on Elementary Cognitive Tasks Despite No Differences on the Wonderlic Personnel Test , 2017 .

[26]  R A Steer,et al.  Psychometric characteristics of revised Sociotropy and Autonomy Scales in college students. , 1995, Behaviour research and therapy.

[27]  B. Fischhoff,et al.  Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Learning and Memory , 1980 .

[28]  Phillip L. Ackerman,et al.  Determinants of Individual Differences and Gender Differences in Knowledge. , 2001 .

[29]  James M. Royer.  Developing Reading and Listening Comprehension Tests Based on the Sentence Verification Technique (SVT). , 2001 .

[30]  P. David Pearson.  Handbook of reading research. , 1990 .

[31]  Bill E Peterson,et al.  Beyond Politics: Authoritarianism and the Pursuit of Leisure , 2006, The Journal of social psychology.

[32]  Rasha Kamhawi,et al.  Engaging the Female Audience: An Evolutionary Psychology Perspective on Gendered Responses to News Valence Frames , 2008 .

[33]  Annie Lang.  Using the Limited Capacity Model of Motivated Mediated Message Processing to Design Effective Cancer Communication Messages , 2006 .

[34]  R. Mayer,et al.  A Split-Attention Effect in Multimedia Learning: Evidence for Dual Processing Systems in Working Memory , 1998 .

[35]  Pamela J. Shoemaker,et al.  Hardwired for News: Using Biological and Cultural Evolution to Explain the Surveillance Function , 1996 .

[36]  Bruce K. Britton,et al.  Use of cognitive capacity in reading identical texts with different amounts of discourse level meaning. , 1979 .

[37]  Walter Kintsch,et al.  Toward a model of text comprehension and production. , 1978 .

[38]  Lindsay H. Shaw,et al.  Users Divided? Exploring the Gender Gap in Internet Use , 2002, Cyberpsychology Behav. Soc. Netw..

[39]  Bruce K. Britton,et al.  Reading and cognitive capacity usage: Effects of text difficulty. , 1978 .

[40]  S. F. Witelson,et al.  Women have greater density of neurons in posterior temporal cortex , 1995, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[41]  Michael Burgoon,et al.  The Relationship between Writing Style and Personality Structure , 1981 .

[42]  David A. Jones.  Why Americans Don’t Trust the Media , 2004 .

[43]  K. McGrath,et al.  Women and Newspapers , 1993 .

[44]  Annie Lang,et al.  Measuring psychological responses to media messages , 1994 .

[45]  D. A. Kenny,et al.  The moderator-mediator variable distinction in social psychological research: conceptual, strategic, and statistical considerations. , 1986, Journal of personality and social psychology.

[46]  R. Gorski,et al.  Sex differences in the corpus callosum of the living human being , 1991, The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience.

[47]  Annie Lang,et al.  The limited capacity model of mediated message processing , 2000 .

[48]  H. Gans.  Deciding What's News: A Study of CBS Evening News, NBC Nightly News, Newsweek and Time , 1979 .

[49]  James M. Royer,et al.  A Sentence Verification Technique for Measuring Reading Comprehension1 , 1979 .

[50]  Annie Lang,et al.  The effects of production pacing and arousing content on the information processing of television messages , 1999 .

[51]  J. Mcglone,et al.  Sex differences in human brain asymmetry: a critical survey , 1980, Behavioral and Brain Sciences.

[52]  Cory L. Armstrong.  Writing About Women: An Examination of How Content for Women Is Determined in Newspapers , 2006 .

[53]  Stuart Allan,et al.  News, gender, and power , 1998 .

[54]  Bernd H. Schmitt,et al.  Sex Typing and Consumer Behavior: A Test of Gender Schema Theory , 1988 .

[55]  Ronald A. Yaros.  Is It the Medium or the Message? Structuring Complex News to Enhance Engagement and Situational Understanding by Nonexperts , 2006, Commun. Res..

[56]  N. Cowan,et al.  A central capacity limit to the simultaneous storage of visual and auditory arrays in working memory. , 2007, Journal of experimental psychology. General.

[57]  K. Schönbach,et al.  newspapers : A substitute or complement for print newspapers and other information channels ? , 2005 .

[58]  W. Schramm,et al.  Measuring Another Dimension of Newspaper Readership , 1947 .

[59]  B. Tabachnick,et al.  Using Multivariate Statistics , 1983 .

[60]  D. Delis,et al.  Sex differences in verbal learning , 1988 .

[61]  Doris Aaronson,et al.  Extensions of Grier's computational formulas for A' and B'' to below-chance performance. , 1987 .