Examining the Role of Affective Language in Predicting the Agenda-Setting Effect
27 Pages Posted: 1 Aug 2011 Last revised: 24 Aug 2011
Date Written: 2011
Abstract
Research investigating the media’s ability to influence the public agenda has been one of the most successful paradigms in political communication and psychology. However, with few exceptions the role of emotion in agenda-setting has been all but neglected (but see Miller, 2007). This research investigates how the level of emotionality, specifically arousal and valence, in news reports predicts agenda-setting effects, as well as how emotionality interacts with accessibility produced by the volume of news coverage on four issues. New York Times articles pertaining to the debt ceiling debate, Social Security, tax cuts, and gay marriage were content analyzed in the period spanning 2004 through the present, and weighted on two affective dimensions using the Affective Norms for English Words data set. Online searches using the Google Trends service were used as a proxy for agenda-setting behavior (see Ripberger, 2011; Gruszczynski and Wagner, N.d.). Both the level of arousal and valence in articles are shown to predict agenda-setting, even when controlling for news volume, and interact in meaningful ways to influence public uptake of an issue.
Keywords: agenda-setting, affect, emotions
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