Emotional Information in News Reporting on Audience Cognitive Processing in the Age of Posttruth: An Electroencephalogram and Functional Connectivity Approach

Abstract

The purpose of the present study is to explore how the emotionalized expression of news content in the posttruth era affects the cognitive processing of the audiences. One news that was text-written with two different expression types (emotional expression vs. neutral expression) was adopted as an experiment material in the study, and changes in cortical activity during news reporting reading tasks were examined with electroencephalograms, sampled from nine sites and four channels and analyzed with weighted phase lag index (wPLI) based on brain functional connectivity (FC) method. The results show that emotional discourses caused a stronger cortical brain activity and more robust brain FC (beta oscillations); besides, reading emotionalized expression consumed more attention resources but fewer cognitive resources, which may impede further rational thinking of the audiences.