Short-term media effects include the alterations of sensitivity toward the real violence from the Past

The purpose of this study was to identify the impact of TV news on the perception and processing of the emotional footage of a historical documentary. We noted that the emotional frames taken from TV news stories are relatively weak emotional stimuli compared to the emotional frames of historical documentary. The subjects exposed to the pre-stimulus evaluated the Holocaust pictures as more unpleasant and more activating than those without it. The ERPs recorded during the presentation of the negative (historical) images had various amplitudes of oscillations due to the preliminary affective impact of TV news footage. The amplitude of P300 in frontal zones was bigger for the group without the preliminary exposure to the emotional TV news frames due to the reduced sensitivity to the content of images. In this case, the historical images demanded less attention and less emotional effort for emotional evaluation of visual information, analysis, retrieval of information from memory and semantic processes, namely search for the meaning of the pictures (occipital P300 and LPP). Short-term media effects include alterations of sensitivity toward the emotional content of visual information.