A cross-national study suggests consumers around the world have stronger psychophysiological reactions to negative news when compared to positive news. The report is one of the largest of its kind and was published in PNAS.

Bad news tends to dominate the headlines and one explanation involves something called the negativity bias. This term describes the tendency for people to give more weight to negative information over positive information. This bias towards negative content has important repercussions where media is concerned, since it affects what gets reported in the news and ultimately how citizens view current affairs.

“In a period during which news around the world is especially wrought with negativity, this subject is of obvious significance,” said study author Stuart Soroka of the University of Michigan in a news release.

Most of the existing research on negativity bias in response to news was based on Anglo-American samples. This recent report aimed to expand this research by examining the negativity bias on a cross-national level, with results from a 6-continent experimental study. Researchers also set out to look at individual differences in reactions to negative news.

This extensive study compared results from lab experiments run in 17 different countries and involving 1,156 participants. Participants watched seven BBC World News stories while their physiological responses were measured via skin conductance and blood volume pulse. Participants were shown news stories that were either positive, negative or neutral in tone, as assessed by expert coders.

During negative news stories, participants across all countries showed higher heart rate variability than during positive new stories, which could be due to heightened attention and arousal. Furthermore, those watching negative news showed a greater change in normalized skin conductance levels compared to those watching neutral or positive news. This suggests again that negative news evokes greater physiological arousal from consumers across the globe.

Researchers note the great significance of these findings, which suggest that people all around the world react more strongly to negative news content. While journalists are responsible for producing more negative news, it could be that consumers are demanding it, consciously or not.

Still, while people’s reaction to news showed a negativity bias overall, researchers discovered a great deal of within-country variability. Many participants actually showed no change in responses when videos became increasingly negative in tone. More research is needed to explain this variability, but it seems that individual differences were not strongly connected to country of origin.

The study reveals that a negativity bias in reaction to news is not simply a North American phenomenon. Although the findings show an overall increased arousal towards negative news, the large amount of individual variation in responses suggests that more people than previously thought might actually prefer positive or neutral news items. The results, the authors write, “highlight the potential for more positive content, and suggest that there may be reason to reconsider the conventional journalistic wisdom that ‘if it bleeds, it leads.'”

The report, “Cross-national evidence of a negativity bias in psychophysiological reactions to news”, was authored by Stuart Soroka, Patrick Fournierc, and Lilach Nir.