Nov 29, 2022 21:00:00

Eye tracking experiments revealed that ``negative comments'' are more likely to attract attention on SNS

Some of the news articles you often see on the Internet allow you to post comments. A study using eye tracking technology that tracks gaze has confirmed that negative comments on news articles are literally more eye-catching than positive comments.

May I have your Attention, please? An eye tracking study on emotional social media comments - ScienceDirect

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.chb.2022.107495

Eye-tracking study suggests that negative comments on social media are more attention-grabbing than positive comments
https://www.psypost.org/2022/11/eye-tracking-study-suggests-that-negative-comments-on-social-media-are-more-attention-grabbing-than-positive-comments-64368

A research team led by Susan Kohout of the University of Amsterdam asked students to read articles and watch their eye movements to investigate how people pay attention to emotional content on social media. We conducted an experiment tracking with an eye tracker. The participants in the experiment were 169 men and women with an average age of 20, but those who could not collect enough eye tracking data were excluded from the analysis, so the final number of participants was 155.

In the experiment, each participant sat in front of an eye-tracking device and read two fictional articles created to resemble the layout of news posted on Facebook and the comments received on each article. One of the two articles had 4 comments of 'negative, positive, neutral x 2', and the other had 4 comments of 'anger, fear, neutral x 2'.

The research team divided the participants into a ``heuristic information processing group'' who had only 30 seconds to read, and a ``systematic information processing group'' who could read as much as they liked. , it was found that negative comments had a longer gaze retention time than positive comments.

This suggests that negative comments are more likely to be noticed than positive comments in the time that the typical Internet user spends scanning an article. However, when we conducted a questionnaire asking about perceptions of posts after the experiment, we found that negative comments were not perceived more strongly just because they had been reading for a long time. Researchers believe this suggests that participants may be trying to avoid negative information or deliberately suppress it so they don't remember it later.

On the other hand, in the systematic information processing group, where they could read as many articles as they wanted, angry comments were read longer than fearful comments, and angry comments were recognized more strongly in subsequent surveys. This result supports previous

research that anger encourages deeper information processing than fear. However, the research team thought that ``the heuristic information processing group, which can read only 30 seconds, would give priority to angry emotions,'' so it is also written that it was unexpected in that sense.

In this study, comments were divided by general emotions such as positive and negative, anger and fear, and the focus was not on the source and topic of the news, the emotional level and the differences in detailed emotions. Kohout et al. Position this research as a stepping stone for further research in the future.

On top of that, the research team said in the paper, ``Negative emotions have higher visual attention when compared to positive emotions.In addition, when information is processed systematically, Emotions of anger received more attention than emotions of fear.”