Individual differences in processing emotional television: The role of Liberalism and Conservatism

Research has shown that media effects vary among individuals, and individual differences play an important role in predicting media effects. The current study investigates the role that individual differences play in processing emotional television. It specifically looks at how Liberals and Conservatives process emotional television messages differently. This study uses psychophysiological measures to examine differences in systems associated with the appetitive and aversive motivational systems, and to examine resource allocation to emotional stimuli. Participants also participated in a signal detection task to test recognition sensitivity for the television messages. A pretest was conducted in which 70 participants rated each stimulus clip based on their experienced arousal, experienced valence, and experienced dominance during the clip. Clips that best fit the experimental conditions; highly arousing pleasant, moderately arousing pleasant, highly arousing unpleasant, and moderately arousing unpleasant. Seventy-nine participants enrolled in Mass Communications classes or belonging student organizations participated in the final experiment. This study found that activation of the appetitive and aversive motivational systems vary among liberals and conservatives, such that participants high in liberalism responded most strongly to unpleasant clips and participants high in conservatism responded most strongly to pleasant clips.