Images, Emotions, and Credibility: Effect of Emotional Facial Expressions on Perceptions of News Content Bias and Source Credibility in Social Media

Abstract

Images are an indispensable part of the news we consume. Highly emotional images from mainstream and misinformation sources can greatly influence our trust in the news. We present two studies on the effects of emotional facial images on users' perception of bias in news content and the credibility of sources. In study 1, we investigate the impact of repeated exposure to content with images containing positive or negative facial expressions on users’ judgements of source credibility and bias. In study 2, we focus on sources' systematic emotional portrayal of specific politicians. Our results show the presence of negative (angry) facial emotions can lead to perceptions of higher bias in content. We also find that systematic portrayal negative portrayal of different politicians leads to lower perceptions of source credibility. These results highlight how implicit visual propositions manifested by emotions in facial expressions might have a substantial effect on our trust in news.