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Technological change has produced a high-choice media environment in which selective exposure and news avoidance are increasingly feasible and common. The literature has suggested several correlates of news avoidance, and recent work has particularly emphasized the potential significance of negative affective responses to news. This paper argues for the use of psychophysiological methods to better understand how emotional responses drive news avoidance. In doing so, we question the assumption—evident both in the literature on physiology and news, and in the literature on news and newsmaking—that physiological activation is positively associated with attention. We also offer an expository analysis of data from a physiological experiment in which respondents viewed stories for which activation quite likely motivated increased prolonged attention amongst some respondents, but a desire to avoid that content amongst others.
Carbone et al. (Mon,) studied this question.