To reduce negative emotional responses and to stimulate prosociality, constructive journalism promotes the inclusion of positive emotions and solutions in news. This study experimentally tested whether including those elements indeed increased prosocial intentions and behavior among children, and whether negative emotions and self-efficacy are mediators in this regard. To this end, children were exposed to an emotion-based, solution-based, or non-constructive news video. Results showed that emotion-based and solution-based news reduced children’s negative emotions compared to non-constructive news. No direct effects for (...) prosocial intentions were found, but solution-based news led to less prosocial behavior than emotion-based and non-constructive news. Moreover, negative emotions served as a mediator, self-efficacy did not. The more negative emotions were elicited by a news story, the higher the prosocial intentions and behavior. In conclusion, a constructive style of reporting helps to reduce children’s negative emotional responses but subsequently hinders prosociality. (shrink)

Despite growing concerns that children tend to avoid the news, the reasons why have received little research attention. Therefore, the current study aims to develop and test a model conceptualizing the relations between children’s news consumption, news avoidance, emotional responses, and parent and child mitigation strategies. The model was tested using data collected during the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic. The current, preregistered, survey study was part of a longitudinal project and used data from the second wave. Data were (...) collected in November/December 2020 among 510 children. Findings showed that children who consumed more news during the pandemic avoided pandemic news less often. Children who experienced more anxiety-related behaviors regarding pandemic news avoided pandemic news more often. The relation between news consumption and emotional responses was stronger for children who experienced restrictive parental mediation more often, indicating that this was not an effective parental mediation strategy for tempering their emotional responses. Children with higher levels of emotional responses used reactive coping strategies more often. However, this did not seem to be an effective strategy against pandemic news avoidance because none of the strategies had a negative relation with pandemic news avoidance. Distancing was even positively related to pandemic news avoidance. Although the current study was not able to fully unravel how news avoidance-related constructs relate to one another, we were able to get some important insights guiding future research. Specifically, it is of crucial importance to unravel the mechanisms that increase the chance of children’s news avoidance and those that mitigate it, to build interventions to counteract news avoidance and to protect children from the negative emotional consequences by news consumption. (shrink)

This article examines whether there are differences between older and younger adults in recall and liking of arousing television commercials. As hypothesized, the experiment demonstrated that older adults remembered brands and products in calm commercials better than in arousing commercials, and they also liked calm commercials more. In contrast, younger adults remembered brands and products in arousing commercials better and they liked these commercials more. In addition, linear relationships showed that for older adults arousal deteriorates their recall and liking, whereas (...) for younger adults arousal – up to a certain point – is beneficial. These findings strongly suggest that advertising effects found in younger samples are unlikely to be the same for older target groups. An important practical implication is that it currently seems wise to make commercials targeted towards older adults calm instead of arousing when the aim is to generate brand recall and liking. (shrink)