Abstract
Television viewers’ attention is increasingly more often divided between television and “second screens”, for example when viewing television broadcasts and following their related social media discussion on a tablet computer. The attentional costs of such multitasking may vary depending on the ebb and flow of the social media channel, such as its emotional contents. In the present study, we tested the hypothesis that negative social media messages would draw more attention than similar positive messages. Specifically, news broadcasts were presented in isolation and with simultaneous positive or negative Twitter messages on a tablet to 38 participants in a controlled experiment. Recognition memory, gaze tracking, cardiac responses, and self-reports were used as attentional indices. The presence of any tweets on the tablet decreased attention to the news broadcasts. As expected, negative tweets drew longer viewing times and elicited more attention to themselves than positive tweets. Negative tweets did not, however, decrease attention to the news broadcasts. Taken together, the present results demonstrate a negativity bias exists for social media messages in media multitasking; however, this effect does not amplify the overall detrimental effects of media multitasking.
Highlights
Television viewers are increasingly more often using secondary media devices such as tablets and mobile phones at the same time as viewing television [1,2]
The main finding was that negative tweets draw more gaze dwell time and are recognized better than positive tweets
Increased gaze dwell time on negative tweets was supported both by gaze tracking data and subjective evaluations. These results cannot be explained by varying Twitter message lengths or intensities, given that the positive and negative tweets were matched in length and the strength of their expressed attitudes
Summary
Television viewers are increasingly more often using secondary media devices such as tablets and mobile phones at the same time as viewing television [1,2]. H1a-c: Negative tweets will elicit (a) higher self-reported attention, (b) longer gaze dwell times, and (c) better recognition memory than positive tweets. The LC4MP model [5,6] holds that the attentional processing of mediated messages is limited by the fixed pool of cognitive resources Both bottleneck theories and the LC4MP model predict that people can process only one visual media stream efficiently at a time. In the present media multitasking context, we expected that orienting responses would be driven primarily by the television broadcasts (see above) This means that if negative Twitter messages would draw more attention away from the television broadcasts than positive Twitter messages, they should elicit weaker cardiac orienting responses (shorter IBIs). We note that a plausible alternative hypothesis to H3 is that negative as compared with positive tweets will elicit increased attention to the news broadcasts
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