SANS 2025: New Research Reveals Why Negative News Headlines Get Clicked

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Why does bad news grab (an keep!) our attention? New research from the Cognitive Communication Science Lab at UC Davis sheds light on how emotionally charged news headlines influence the way we make decisions.

At the 2025 Annual Meeting of the Social and Affective Neuroscience Society (SANS), Dr. Richard Huskey and collaborators are presenting findings from a two-part study that combines computational modeling and fMRI. The research shows that people are more likely to select news headlines that are negatively valenced and high in arousal. This preference is driven by faster evidence accumulation in the brain, measured by what decision scientists call drift rate, and is reflected in neural activity in key subcortical decision-making regions.

The team will present a Blitz Talk (Session #2) and a poster (P2-A-5) during SANS 2025 in Chicago on Friday, April 25.

Download the full poster here.

Poster titled “Negatively Valenced and High-Arousal News Headlines Drive Preferential Evidence Accumulation and Influence Selection” by Gong et al. Presented at the SANS 2025 Annual Meeting. The poster features four main sections: Background, Methods, Results, and Conclusions. The Background summarizes prior research on negativity bias and its political implications. The Methods section describes two studies: a behavioral study with 300 nationally representative participants and an fMRI study with 30 young adults (16 Democrats, 14 Republicans). Participants completed a two-choice task involving 140 economic news headlines generated and rated for emotional valence and arousal. The Results show that negatively valenced, high-arousal headlines produced faster evidence accumulation (higher drift rate), moderated by political ideology. fMRI results revealed subcortical brain activation (e.g., caudate, nucleus accumbens, thalamus) that correlated with drift rate. Graphs display estimated drift rates across political groups and brain activity contrasts for valence and arousal. The Conclusions highlight that, when arousal and valence are statistically separated, both drive preference, supporting a value-based model of decision making. Institutional affiliations and references are listed at the bottom.

Gong, X., Ulusoy, E., Riggs, E., Kee, R., Zhao, Z., Snyder, A., Coronel, J., Eden, A., Boydstun, A., & Huskey, R. (2025, April). Negatively Valenced and High-Arousal News Headlines Drive Preferential Evidence Accumulation and Influence Selection Behavior. SANS Annual Meeting, Chicago, IL.