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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Front. Polit. Sci.
Sec. Political Participation
Volume 6 - 2024 | doi: 10.3389/fpos.2024.1278055

From News Images to Action: The Mobilizing Effect of Emotional Protest Images in News Coverage

Provisionally accepted
Stephanie Geise Stephanie Geise 1*Diana Panke Diana Panke 2
  • 1 University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany
  • 2 University of Freiburg, Freiburg, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

    The political power of images has probably never been stronger than in today's "information age" in which mobile devices allow instant access to news coverage of local, national, and global events, which are generally visualized in some way. Thus, this paper investigates whether political news images mobilize people to engage in political protest by appealing to their emotions. A pre-post-design integrating eye tracking with 143 participants examines how the observation of protest images in news coverage induces emotions and affects participatory intents. This reveals that a longer image observation activates both positive and negative discrete emotions (i.e., fascination, interest, sadness, anger, disgust, shame, guilt and being touched) which increase the image recipients' willingness to participate politically.Additionally, for people with a high level of political interest, longer exposure to an emotioninducing news image increases their willingness to participate in political activism, while a low level of political interest produces a negative effect.

    Keywords: Media images, Emotions, political participation, experiment, eye tracking

    Received: 15 Aug 2023; Accepted: 09 Sep 2024.

    Copyright: © 2024 Geise and Panke. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

    * Correspondence: Stephanie Geise, University of Bremen, Bremen, Germany

    Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.