Replicating and extending Soroka, Fournier & Nir (2019): negative news increases arousal and negative affect

The negativity bias hypothesis in political communication contends that people are more aroused by negative vs. positive news. Soroka, Fournier and Nir (2019, SFN) provide evidence for this negativity bias in a study in 17 countries across 6 continents. We replicate and confirm SFN's central finding that negativity causes an increase in physiological arousal in a conceptually close, well-powered, and preregistered replication. We extend SFN in three ways. (1) We theorize, test, and confirm that negative (vs. positive) news causes negative affect as captured by the activity of the corrugator major muscle above the eyebrow using facial Electromyography. (2) We find that people self-report that negative news is causing negative affect but find that positive (instead of negative) news increases self-reported arousal. (3) We test SFN's argument in another context, the Netherlands. Our paper confirms that negative news is arousing but also shows that negative news is, especially, causing negative affect. Doing so, we contribute to the negativity bias argument in political communication research and, at the same time, show the importance of replication in empirical communication research.