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Eye-tracking study suggests that negative

comments on social media are more
attention-grabbing than positive comments
by Beth Ellwood — November 25, 2022 in Cognitive Science, Social Media

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When it comes to reading news stories on social media, new psychology

  Dissociative symptoms are common
findings suggest that people pay more attention to negative comments
among individuals with depression,
than positive ones. This evidence comes from an eye-tracking study study finds

published in the journal Computers in Human Behavior.
 New research pinpoints why makeup

News posts shared on social media often attract emotionally-charged makes female faces look more
attractive
 comments. Moreover, these comments are often negative, which can
have harmful consequences. For example, emotional comments under
 Beware of “phone snubbing”:
 news stories can inspire distrust in news sources and attitude extremity Research reveals just how serious
among users. However, given that social media is inundated with content, phubbing can be
 the extent that users pay attention to these emotional comments is
 Amygdala connectivity predicts
unclear.
ketamine treatment response among
 patients with anxious depression

  A new study says time spent with dogs

increases brain activity in the
prefrontal cortex
Study author Susann Kohout and her colleagues designed an eye-
tracking study to investigate the extent that people pay attention to and  Highly ruminative individuals with
remember emotional content on social media. They also explored the depression exhibit abnormalities in the
neural processing of gastric
extent that people pay attention to negative, positive, angry, and fearful
interoception
content.

In a Dutch university laboratory, 169 students sat in front of an eye tracker

while they were shown three social media news posts. The posts were
artificial news stories designed to resemble Facebook posts. The posts
were each accompanied by four comments which varied in the extent that
they were emotional, non-emotional, positive, negative, angry, or fearful.

The students were divided into two groups — the heuristic processing
group and the systematic processing group. Participants in the heuristic
processing group were given only 30 seconds to read the posts. This
condition was meant to mirror the low-effort processing that people usually
engage in when using social media. Participants in the systematic
processing group were allowed to read the posts carefully and with no
time limit.

The eye-tracker measured the students’ eye movements, which the

researchers used to assess their visual attention. Specifically, the
researchers calculated participants’ dwell time for each comment and
news story by adding up all fixations, saccades, and revisits to each area
of interest. Later, they measured participants’ recognition of the posts with
a survey.

Kohout and her team found that the students showed longer dwell times
for negative compared to positive comments, but only in the heuristic
processing condition. This suggests that when the students were forced to
read the comments quickly, they read the negative comments more often
than the positive ones.

RECENT

 Dissociative symptoms are common

among individuals with depression,
The authors say that these findings fall in line with the negativity bias, study finds
which is the notion that people place more importance on negative
information than positive information. However, participants were not more  Eye-tracking study suggests that
negative comments on social media
likely to recognize information about the negative posts compared to the
are more attention-grabbing than
positive ones. This suggests that participants may have been avoiding this positive comments
negative information or suppressing it so they do not remember it later.
 New research pinpoints why makeup
Students in the systematic condition showed longer dwell times and makes female faces look more
attractive
greater recognition for the angry comments compared to the fearful
comments. This suggests that when the students were given ample time  Amygdala connectivity predicts
to read the comments, they were more likely to read and remember the ketamine treatment response among
story details of the angry comments over the fearful ones. patients with anxious depression

The study authors note that their study should be considered a precursor  Beware of “phone snubbing”:
Research reveals just how serious
to future research given several limitations. For one, they were not able to phubbing can be
consider a wider array of emotions or different social media interfaces
other than Facebook. They were also unable to manipulate the ordering of
 the social media comments. Nonetheless, the findings reveal important
insights.

“First, we have shown that it is important to distinguish discrete negative

emotions (e.g., anger versus fear), as they can affect readers in
significantly different ways,” Kohout and her colleagues write. “Future
research can build on our study by testing the effects of different
emotions, emotional cues, and processing strategies as well as different
news providers, formats, and topics. Second, due to effects as
information, future research should consider how emotionally invested
people might get when reading comments, and how this might affect their
information processing.”

The study, “May I have your Attention, please? An eye tracking study on
emotional social media comments”, was authored by Susann Kohout,
Sanne Kruikemeier, and Bert N. Bakker.

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