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Psychophysiological audience responses to war journalism and peace journalism

Jake Lynch and Annabel McGoldrickThe University of Sydney, Australia; University of Johannesburg, South Africa

James HeathersThe University of Sydney, Australia

AbstractThis article presents and discusses the results of an experiment in which television viewers were exposed to either a war journalism (WJ) or a peace journalism (PJ) version of two news stories, on Australian government policies towards asylum seekers and US-sponsored ‘peace talks’ between Israel and the Palestinians, respectively. Before and after viewing, they completed a cognitive questionnaire and two tests designed to disclose changes in their emotional state. During the viewing, they also underwent measurement of blood volume pulse, from which their heart rate variability (HRV) was calculated. HRV measures effects on the autonomic nervous system caused by changes in breathing patterns as subjects respond to stimuli with empathic concern. Since these patterns are regulated by the vagal nerve, HRV readings can therefore be interpreted as an indicator of vagal tone, which Porges et al. propose as an ‘autonomic correlate of emotion’. In this study, vagal tone decreased from baseline through both WJ stories, but showed a slightly smaller decrease during the PJ asylum story and then a significant increase during the PJ Israel–Palestine story. These readings correlated with questionnaire results showing greater hope and empathy among PJ viewers and increased anger and distress among WJ viewers, of the Israel–Palestine story.

KeywordsAudience responses, peace journalism, physiological testing, television news

Corresponding author:Jake Lynch, Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies, The University of Sydney, Room 121, Mackie Building (K01), Sydney, NSW 2006, Australia. Email: [email protected]

606295 GMC0010.1177/1742766515606295Global Media and CommunicationLynch et al.research-article2015

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202 Global Media and Communication 11(3)

The role of peace journalism (PJ) was summarized by Johan Galtung as ‘making audible and visible the subjugated aspects of reality’ (cited in Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005: 224, personal communication, 21 March 2003). Decades earlier, Galtung had shown, with Mari Holmboe Ruge (1965), that influences on news content are predominantly struc-tural, manifest in a set of news values, or ‘tuning factors’, which arise from the economic and political interests of media industries.

These influences gave rise to conventions, perhaps the most salient of which, when reporting conflict, is ‘frequency’ – a bias, in news, in favour of event over process, with prominence accorded to manifest increments that begin and end in the interval between deadlines, hence the daily digest of bombs and battles in the reporting of conflict. Another widespread convention, Galtung and Ruge (1965) argued, was elite orienta-tion: ‘hardly strange [because] the actions of the elite are, at least usually and in short-term perspective, more consequential … [which] applies to elite nations as well as to elite people’ (p. 68).

The operation of such conventions, over time, leads to certain identifiable perspec-tives, orders of priority and versions of events dominating in news discourse, while oth-ers are subjugated. So, for instance, ‘In an elite-centred news communication system, ordinary people are not even given the chance of representing themselves’ (Galtung and Ruge, 1965: 68). The continuing predictive capacity of the Galtung–Ruge newsworthi-ness model was confirmed in a later study by Harcup and O’Neill (2001), with ‘enter-tainment’ the only significant addition as a major theme of news.

PJ was conceived as a remedial strategy, a programmatic response to ‘the policy implications of the [1965] study’ (Lynch and Galtung, 2010: xii). One of its key precepts, of both news values and reportorial technique – disseminated worldwide in countless pedagogical initiatives – is on how to establish the consequentiality of non-elite people:

The challenge is to convey their connection with the conflict, and the outlook for its likely development, in the course of a news story … you need … to construct a framework of understanding, in which the relevance of new perspectives to the story about the bomb can be made clear. (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005: 165–166, emphasis in the original)

Galtung and Ruge based their findings on a study of Norwegian newspaper reporting on crises in Cuba, Cyprus and the Congo. Today, however, the milieu in which the issues of representation they raised, and their potential political ramifications, are perhaps most widely discussed is the Israel–Palestine conflict. Philo and Berry (2004) showed how the operation of news reporting conventions produced impressions among audience mem-bers, of basic facts about this conflict, that were conducive to politically dominant per-spectives in a US-allied country such as the United Kingdom, where the fieldwork was carried out while unsupported by evidence from the conflict itself.

At one point during their initial survey research, Philo and Berry found that British television viewers were, for example, more likely to believe it was the Palestinians who were occupying the Occupied Territories, than to realize it was the Israelis. They had heard the words, ‘occupied’ and ‘occupation’, but these were never adequately explained. Aspects of background and context, essential to understand the situation, would inevita-bly require an account of process, rather than a mere recitation of events, so would

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generally be excluded by the ‘frequency’ tuning factor. And the elite voices from Israel and the United States, who – Philo and Berry showed – dominated the choice of on-screen commentators presented as consequential in UK television news had no interest in dwelling on the illegality of Israel’s military occupation of territory it seized by force in 1967 or of the settlements it has established on that land.

The subjugation of these aspects in media framing found its direct correlative, Philo and Berry found, in audience framing:

There was no apparent rationale for Palestinian actions when they attacked Israelis. The Palestinians could thus be seen as ‘starting’ the violence. The Israelis were portrayed in the news as ‘responding’ to those attacks … the audience clearly took this message from what they saw [on television news]. (Philo, 2010: 412)

This is the background against which routine Israeli protestations of self-defence, in the military onslaughts on Gaza of recent years, are played out. The UN Human Rights Council Fact Finding Mission on ‘Operation Cast Lead’, in 2008–2009, said it was:

Designed to punish, humiliate and terrorise a civilian population, radically diminish its local economic capacity both to work and to provide for itself, and to force upon it an ever increasing sense of dependency and vulnerability.

No equivalent study to the one by Philo and Berry (2004) has been published on Australian television news or its effect on framings by Australian audiences. However, a national survey on Australian public understanding and opinions concerning the Israel–Palestine conflict found:

the largest plurality (37%) selected ‘Ancient hostility between Jews and Arabs’ [as] the main cause of the conflict … which is the dominant narrative in popular culture including films and television programmes but devoid of historical evidence [to support it]. (Han and Rane, 2011: 60)

This is the explanation that tends to ‘prevail by default’ (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005: 63) in the absence of any explicit contextualizing material.

To make good on these deficits is, then, a task for the remedial strategy of PJ. PJ is a set of distinctions in the reporting of conflict, put forward originally by Johan Galtung (1998) and operationalized in subsequent research to yield evaluative criteria for content analysis (Dente Ross and Tehranian, 2008; Lee and Maslog, 2005; Lynch, 2004, among others). Surveying early examples of this research, Shinar (2007: 200) found that schol-ars identified, as PJ, reporting of conflict issues which:

1. Explores backgrounds and contexts of conflict formation and presents causes and options on every side so as to portray conflict in realistic terms, transparent to the audience;

2. Gives voice to the views of all rival parties (not merely leaders from two antago-nistic ‘sides’);

3. Airs creative ideas, from any source (including non-elite sources), for conflict resolution, development, peace-making and peacekeeping;


4. Exposes lies, cover-up attempts and culprits on all sides and reveals excesses committed by, and suffering inflicted on, people of all parties;

5. Pays attention to peace stories and post-war developments.

For the experiment of which a part is presented and discussed in this article, these five observed characteristics were adopted as a set of headings for the codification of the war journalism (WJ) and PJ versions of familiar stories from television news, in four coun-tries (Australia, the Philippines, South Africa and Mexico) between September 2010 and May 2012. The WJ versions were stories that had already been recently broadcast by a television newsroom in each country that acted as host and partner for the research. PJ versions were created by gathering new material (pictures and interviews) and re-editing and re-scripting in the same style and to approximately the same duration as the first (with some material from the WJ version shortened and/or omitted, to make room) and voiced by the same reporter who had recorded the original. In all, between the four loca-tions, 21 stories were re-versioned in this way. In each place, a WJ and a PJ ‘bulletin’ were created by recording the stories through a studio, with ‘links’ (introductions) read from autocue by a local television news presenter.

Distinctions in the PJ model, arranged under Shinar’s five general headings (above), were fine-tuned to ‘capture’ differences of representation likely to prove ideational among audiences at the particular time and place of the experiment, with reference to the particular stories and conflicts chosen. Understanding of the issues at stake in audience framing was developed, in each country case, through a process attentive to the princi-ples of Critical Discourse Analysis, ‘focusing on the role of discourse in the reproduction and challenge of dominance’ in an ‘unabashedly normative’ quest to create opportunities for ‘change through critical understanding’ (Van Dijk, 1993: 251–253).

In Phase 1 of the research, the PJ and WJ bulletins were played to different audiences in each country, with a range of techniques employed to generate both qualitative and quantitative data, to compare viewer responses. A total of 472 participants in the four countries were broken up into groups of equal size for simultaneous screenings in sepa-rate rooms of the WJ and PJ ‘bulletins’ in each country. These took place in October 2010 in Australia, February 2011 in the Philippines, April 2012 in South Africa and May 2012 in Mexico.

The Differential Emotion Scale (DES; Izard, 1977) was employed to test for differ-ences between the groups before and after viewing, similar to the method used by Unz et al. (2008). The DES is a 30-item questionnaire, consisting of 10 fundamental emo-tions, each assessed by three items. The ten fundamental emotions in this scale are inter-est, enjoyment, surprise, distress, anger, disgust, contempt, fear, empathy and guilt. Each of these 30 items is rated on a 5-point Likert scale (1 = very slightly, not at all; 5 = extremely), yielding a score out of 5.

Before watching the bulletin, Phase 1 participants filled in the DES to measure base-line levels on each of the 10 subscales, which revealed no statistically significant pre-existing differences between any ‘pair’ of groups in any of the countries. During the bulletin, the video was paused at the end of each story for participants to fill in another DES, enabling changes in their self-reported emotional state to be tracked across the bul-letin in response to each story, compared with the baseline.

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During the pauses between stories, Phase 1 participants were also asked to perform a Thought-Listing Protocol (TLP), inviting them to simply write down any notes about thoughts or feelings prompted by what they had just watched (following the method pioneered by Coleman and Thorson, 2002; see also Russo et al., 1989; Shapiro, 1994). Data from these TLPs were themed according to a simplified version of Entman’s (1993) four functions of substantive framing:

•• Moral evaluation;•• Problem definition (Entman also names causal interpretation, though for the pur-

poses of this study they have been conflated, in order to simplify the model for ease of application);

•• Treatment recommendation.

Results from Phase 1 of the study are presented in Lynch and McGoldrick (2013), Lynch (2014) and McGoldrick and Lynch (2014). In general, the results showed that ‘cognitive responses shared by participants … in TLPs and focus groups, were led by emotional responses’ (Lynch, 2014: 160). Watching PJ generally ‘left people less angry and fearful, and more hopeful and empathic’ (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2013: 1041), with this response leading to an increase in receptiveness to non-violent conflict responses:

Where members of a particular group have been the subject of psychological distancing in political spectacle, presenting their perspective in their own words is an essential element of an approach leading to greater empathy, hope and happiness among TV viewers, and less anger and fear. If accompanied by suitable explanation of contexts and backgrounds, this in turn activates audience [cognitive] frames in which problem definitions are more likely to be structural than focused on individual malefactors, and treatment recommendations therefore focused more on the delivery of [social] justice … than on deterrence and punishment. (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2013: 1055)

Some of the strongest interactions between the independent variable (media framing) and dependent variable (audience responses) in Phase 1 of the study (McGoldrick and Lynch, 2014) came in response to two stories dealing with Australian government policy towards asylum seekers and a stage of the Israel–Palestine ‘peace talks’ brokered by then-US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton. Both featured a non-elite speaker or protago-nist in a framework of understanding which, the Phase 1 results suggested, prompted and enabled viewers to appreciate the consequentiality of the perspectives they presented. In the story about responses to asylum seekers, Ali Jafaari, a refugee who had arrived by boat from Afghanistan, talked of fleeing persecution to make a new life and wanting to make Australia proud of him. In the Israel–Palestine story, Bishara Costandi, the Palestinian refugee now living in Sydney, invited local residents to imagine a journey in the occupied West Bank as the equivalent of setting out to travel from Marrickville to Glebe (two adjacent suburbs), only to have to negotiate 14 army checkpoints. Hence, these were the two stories selected for further data collection in Phase 2 of the study.

The Phase 1 findings must be regarded as subject to a number of methodological limi-tations. Self-reporting emotional questionnaires, such as the DES, have their limits in that people are not always aware of feelings – what they are and what they are experiencing in


their body. They may have disassociated from their feelings or lack the linguistic dexterity to express their emotions and/or use the adjectives in the tests in different ways to those conceived by their designers. This could explain why the DES did not always demonstrate strong interactions for individual emotions, even when responses in TLPs and Focus Group Discussions (FGDs) seemed to indicate a pronounced response.

So, the aim in Phase 2 of the research was to gather more direct, less filtered indica-tions of emotional responses. Since a large amount of brain activity is unconscious, a physiological measure of heart rate variability (HRV) was used. Second, the testing was slowed down, showing participants only two stories, rather than six, to ensure clearer measures of responses to these stories. And third, closer attention was paid to cognitive changes by measuring thoughts about the topics in these two stories one week before viewing and then again directly afterwards.

In addition to the physiological testing, another new protocol was devised, drawing on Han and Rane’s 2011 study of Australian public opinion on the Israel–Palestine conflict, to try to obtain indications of the nature and extent of any cognitive shifts brought about among viewers by watching the war or PJ framing of the Israel–Palestine conflict. Because the heart rate measure required the use of specialist equipment, only one participant would be tested at a time and a distraction was needed to ensure that the participant’s heart rate would not be artificially elevated by paying attention to the equipment and the activity around it. A cogni-tive task was created to provide such a distraction, involving two adaptations – one for each story – of the Australian public opinion survey.

Han and Rane (2011), like Philo and Berry (2004), explored the impact of media framing of the Israel–Palestine conflict on public understanding, using a set of ten questions:

To identify respondents’ understanding of the cause and nature of the conflict; perceptions of its global importance; prospects for its resolution; attitudes regarding Australian government involvement and policy preferences; opinions regarding settlements, refugees and Jerusalem; and sources of information. As the Israel–Palestine conflict is subject to multiple narratives, the wording of the questions and the options provided were designed to reflect pro-Israeli, pro-Palestinian and neutral narratives in order to determine the particular narrative with which respondents most closely identified.

The vast majority of the more than 1000 people surveyed by Han and Rane identified the news media as their main source of information on the conflict. Those surveyed online represented Australian citizens and residents, in a sample weighted for gender, age, state of residence and level of education. ‘The overwhelming majority (92 per cent) expressed support for Palestinian refugees’ right of return’, they found. ‘On the issue of Israeli settlements, over three-quarters (78 per cent) expressed opposition’. As Han and Rane argue, these findings ‘are also consistent with Philo and Berry’s (2004) observation of a widespread identification among audiences with ‘common or universal values based on a concern for human suffering as well as opposition to oppressive practices and the excessive use of force’ (Han and Rane, 2011: 66).

Would these opinions change – or perhaps be activated in different ways – compared with the baseline, as a result of watching a news item coded according to either war or PJ

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evaluative criteria? And would opinions change or be differently activated on the other story selected for this step of the study – also highly familiar from the Australian televi-sion news agenda – namely, on government handling of asylum seekers? If so, how? Clearly, participants in this study could not be given the questions on arrival in the room, then again ten minutes later after watching the stories, because they would remember their previous answers, which would risk distorting or even invalidating the experiment. So, participants received their opinion surveys a week before watching the differently framed TV news items and were not accepted into the study unless they had returned their pre-test questionnaires and demographics.

The psychophysiological measures

Several previous studies were based on the use of psychophysiological emotional meas-ures, among people watching videos or listening to a narrative, for the same purpose as that pursued here: to overcome the limitations of self-reporting of emotional states.

Wallentin et al. (2011) used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) brain scans and measured HRV responses from listening to emotionally intense parts of a story. The story was the well-known fairy tale, The Ugly Duckling, by Hans Christian Anderson. The study revealed the regions of the brain activated by narrative emotions and showed that HRV also varied with the emotional intensity of the narrative.

High-frequency HRV signals are thought to reflect parasympathetic modulation of the heart rate. Wallentin et al. (2011) argue that low-frequency components of the HRV sig-nal, on the other hand, are thought to reflect activation of the sympathetic nervous system (SNS):

We found that intense parts of a story yielded comparable shifts in the low frequency/high frequency power ratio in the HRV signal. These shifts are thought to reflect changes in the sympathetic and parasympathetic control of heart rate. This indicates that intense parts of the narrative are accompanied by an increased sympathetic response. (p. 969)

The SNS is believed to be connected with limbic responses such as the ‘fright, flight and fight’ syndrome, whereas the parasympathetic nervous system (PNS) operates in implicit complementarity to it, governing the ‘rest and digest’ functions of the body. What they showed was that telling a story, using variations in linguistic narrative setting, would trigger matching different emotional experiences that can be measured by physi-ological signs such as HRV.

Gomez et al. (2009) used a variety of psychophysiological measures to explore moods induced by four film clips: high-arousal sports, positive low-arousal nature, negative high-arousal torture and negative low-arousal in a film about life in a slum. Their meas-ures included skin conductance level (SCL; see below for a fuller explanation of SCL), HRV and facial expressions to measure changes in mood from watching. They integrated these physiological measures with self-assessment statements. Among their findings was a demonstrable link ‘between subjective feelings and their physiological substrate’. In other words, physiological measures may indeed be useful in tracking mood states (Gomez et al., 2009: 16), and film clips are an effective mood-inducing instrument.


One of the most important effects of PJ, in fulfilling its aim of enabling readers and audiences to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict, is to prompt them to greater empathic responses (Lynch, 2014: 161). De Vignemont and Singer (2006) argue that empathy plays a social role as the motivation for cooperative and social behaviours such as friendship, altruism and helpfulness – all essential building blocks to valuing non-violent responses to conflict.

Oliveira-Silva and Goncalves (2011) looked at the neurobiological mechanisms underlying empathic responses and concluded that they were closely correlated with HRV. The pair showed subjects videos of different emotionally laden vignettes, of 27-second duration, in which an actor portrayed a negative emotion (such as loss, disap-pointment, anger or fear) or a positive emotion (such as enthusiasm, love or delight). Participants were asked to choose among three different empathic responses while their heart rate was measured.

In order to provide a direct point of comparison between what Gomez et al. (2009) call ‘subjective feelings and their physiological substrate’, Phase 2 participants were also asked to provide self-assessed emotional states. As the DES – used in Phase 1 of the study – contains over 30 questions, for this step, it was decided to administer the Positive and Negative Affect Scale (PANAS) as a simpler instrument and one which had been used in an earlier pilot study. As empathy was key, the Emotional Response Questionnaire (ERQ) was added as an instrument to measure it specifically (Myers, 2009).

Methods

Recruitment took place through university advertisements for paid participants to watch TV news bulletins while their heart rate was measured. Only people who had lived in Australia for more than 20 years qualified, to ensure that participants had an Australian outlook and would respond to the new stimuli with reference to meaning structures developed through experience of meaning-making in the Australian media and discur-sive context. The participants were 74 undergraduate and postgraduate students studying for a diverse range of degrees, mainly in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences at the University of Sydney, and were assigned to groups by randomized pair designation (both WAR and PEACE: n = 37) after having completed their initial questionnaire online. Participants were blind to the precise nature of the study and group assignment and were told that the study non-specifically involved the response to news.

Two questionnaires based on the Han and Rane (2011) survey were administered a week before participants were accepted into the study, then again after watching each story on that particular topic. These were designed to explore participants’ understand-ing of contested issues in the Arab–Israeli conflict and asylum seekers in Australia. Both questionnaires contained statements about the nature, causes and solutions for each conflict, with each measured by a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree).

The first pertained to the Israel–Palestine conflict, with suggested causes including ancient hostility between Jews and Arabs, religion, the dispossession of the Palestinian people by Jews who migrated to Palestine or Israelis fighting Palestinian terrorism. And its possible solutions are as follows: whether that means there is no solution; whether

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Australia should be more involved; whether the Australian government should support US-sponsored negotiations or whether negotiations should be based on international law and human rights; whether refugees should be allowed to return to their homeland; and what the final status of Jerusalem should be, the capital of Palestine or Israel, or under the trusteeship of the UN.

The second questionnaire, on asylum seekers, followed a similar approach, first with statements pertaining to why people were coming to Australia: they are envious of our lifestyle; in fear of their safety due to war, abuse of power or discrimination; increasing strife and unrest in the world; and to take advantage of generous state handouts to refugees. Again, each was measured by a 7-point Likert scale (1 = strongly disagree; 7 = strongly agree). Other statements related to Australian government pol-icy are as follows: not sending a tough enough message to would-be asylum seekers; Australia is failing in its international obligations to give asylum to those in need; Australia already takes in its fair share of refugees and has no room for any more; it is very important for Australia to adopt more humane policies towards asylum seekers and Australia’s policy on refugees and asylum seekers should be based more on a need to expand the population, to make a bigger market and fill space. Other state-ments reflected the character of asylum seekers: refugees can go on to make an impor-tant contribution to Australian life; boat people are criminals who should be turned away and boat people are forced to take desperate measures to protect themselves and their families.

Both these pre-test questionnaires about the Israel–Palestine conflict and asylum seekers were administered a week before testing. Participants completed them and then emailed their responses back to the researcher, along with their demographic details. Each person was allocated a 45-minute time slot between 9 a.m. and 4.15 p.m. over a three-week period and instructed to attend the Resource Centre belonging to the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPACS) at the University of Sydney. Upon arrival outside the Resource Centre, participants were asked to wait until being called into the room by the physiology experimenter, either James Heathers or a colleague from his department. Two computers were set up with back-to-back screens so each participant could watch the TV news video and fill in their questionnaires on one terminal, while the experimenter monitored and recorded the heart rate and skin con-ductance on the other.

Upon arriving in the room, participants filled in a consent form and then filled in the first PANAS on the computer while being connected to the heart rate and skin conduct-ance skin sensors, which were attached to the second and third fingers of their non-dominant hand.

First, they watched the asylum TV news story and then filled in the ERQ, followed by the second PANAS and second opinion survey, the first having been filled in a week before. This was followed by the second video on the Arab–Israeli peace talks and the same three other questionnaires: the third PANAS, second ERQ and second opinion survey. Only during the videos were skin conductance and heart rate data recorded. The testing team randomly varied whether participants were shown the war or peace versions of each story, ensuring they kept an accurate account of which version each participant had seen, and that the numbers of war and peace viewers ended up the same.


Results

Opinion survey results

First, the opinion survey results showed some strong cognitive effects as demonstrated by changes in participants’ answers to the questions after viewing each story. After watching the Israel–Palestinian peace talks, more WJ viewers thought ‘religion is the main cause of the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians’, compared with their pre-test answers, but fewer PJ viewers endorsed that statement after viewing than before. Similarly, the number of PJ viewers who thought ‘The Israeli–Palestinian conflict is about Israelis fighting for security against Palestinian terrorism’ went down after view-ing, but WJ viewers became more likely to endorse the statement after viewing. And in response to a third point, ‘There is no solution to the Israeli–Palestinian conflict’, more WJ viewers endorsed after viewing than had done so beforehand, but there was no change after viewing among PJ viewers.

In conclusion, watching WJ made viewers more likely to believe that the conflict was about religion, that Israelis are fighting for security against Palestinian terrorists and that there is no solution to the conflict. But watching PJ made them less likely to see religion as the cause of the conflict and less likely to attribute it to Israelis fighting for security against Palestinian terrorists than they were before viewing.

There were equally some strong results from watching the asylum story, but not quite as expected. There was a small increase in PJ viewers agreeing that ‘Increasing strife and unrest in the world leading people to leave their homes is the main reason for asylum seeker claims here in Australia’. But many more WJ viewers endorsed it after viewing. In a more expected interaction, many more PJ viewers agreed that ‘Boat peo-ple are forced to take desperate measures to protect themselves and their families, and deserve our compassion and support’, compared with their responses to that question before viewing. And WJ viewers became less likely to endorse this statement after watching.

More WJ watchers agreed that ‘Australia’s policy on refugees and asylum seekers should be based more on a need to expand the population, to make a bigger market, and fill space’, compared with their pre-test responses. Fewer PJ viewers agreed after viewing. These results contain an apparent contradiction: the WJ viewers became more likely than before to endorse a statement that frames policy responses to asylum seekers in ‘selfish’ terms – what’s in it for Australia? But the standard political reac-tion to such calculations, across most of Australia’s political parties, is to devise means to limit the numbers arriving, not expand them as implied by the wording of this question.

ERQ empathy measures

There were strong interactions between the experience of watching news with war or peace framing and the extent of empathy among viewers. Students who saw PJ almost exclusively empathized with asylum seekers, whereas the WJ condition was more mixed. However, there appeared to be a saturation effect with the Israel–Palestine conflict, as several people did not have a preference from that story.

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Psychophysiological results

The strategic purpose within the present research of applying the psychophysiological measures outlined above is to show some of the unconscious processes that go into the acts of meaning-making reflected in the results from cognitive and self-reporting emo-tional responses. As noted above, measuring heart rate may indicate when participants are responding with different portions of the autonomic nervous system: the SNS and PNS. ‘When a visceral organ is innervated by both the SNS and the PNS, the effects are antagonistic. For example, SNS neurons … accelerate the heart [whereas] … PNS neu-rons … slow the heart’ (Porges et al., 1994: 168).

A quickening of the heart rate may therefore be triggered by a perception of threat or risk, since – as noted above – the SNS is associated with the limbic ‘fright, flight and fight’ syndrome. A slowing of the heart rate may indicate that the PNS has, as it were, ‘gained the upper hand’ in the innervation of the heart, which may be triggered by the provision of soothing or agreeable stimuli. The vagal nerve is the dominant portion of the PNS and Porges et al. (1994) proposed measuring ‘vagal tone’ (VT) as an ‘autonomic correlate of emotion’ (p. 167).

The ‘primary vagal input to the sino-atrial node … regulate[s] atrial rate … and determine[s] heart rate’ (Porges et al., 1994: 170). Porges et al. propose ‘quantify[ing] respiratory sinus arrhythmia (RSA)’ as a way of ‘evaluating the vagal control of the S-A node (i.e. cardiac vagal tone)’.

Our data for HRV indicate RSA because:

heart-rate increase is associated with phases of inspiration, when respiratory mechanisms in the brain stem attenuate the vagal efferent action on the heart. The heart-rate decrease is associated with phases of expiration, when the vagal efferent influence to the heart is reinstated. (Porges et al., 1994: 170)

In the results set out below, therefore, the dip in heart period (increase in heart rate) among WJ viewers as they watched the asylum story (see Graph 1) may be significant, indicating a lesser degree of reinstatement for the vagal efferent influence to the heart. The change in VT (see Graph 2) may also be significant, with WJ viewers’ VT continu-ing to drop through the experience of watching both stories, whereas PJ viewers’ VT ‘recovered’ when the second story, about the Israel–Palestine conflict, came on. It sug-gests that both PJ versions contain material that viewers found soothing or reassuring, compared with the WJ versions, which supports the findings of the ERQ and PANAS, summarized above.

Collection and analysis

Raw blood volume pulse (BVP) data were smoothed, segmented and subjected to peak extraction (e.g. Heathers et al., 2012; Lu et al., 2009). Specifically, the data were up-sampled from 256 Hz, cubic-spline interpolated to 1000 Hz and periods of interest cor-responding to single cardiac cycles were defined by maximal point of the derivative (i.e. the point of inflection on the curve). These points represent the pulse-to-pulse (PP) inter-vals, which were used as an approximation of the inter-beat interval (IBI).


These intervals were placed on a Poincaré plot, or return map, which takes a series of intervals and plots each interval against the following interval, and inspected manually. Errors were corrected to the conformal waveform if possible or corrected by linear inter-polation if no point of inflection could be identified. BVP traces were deemed artifactual if more than 5 per cent of IBIs required interpolation. All analyses were conducted using custom software in LabView 9.0 (NI, Austin, Texas).

IBIs were extracted from the BVP data in the manner outlined above, segmented according to condition (from here, baseline (BASEL), asylum seeker (ASYL) and Israel–Palestine conflict (ISPAL), according to video segment) and were then con-verted to the measure of VT outlined in Byrne and Porges (1992). Specifically, CardioEdit software (Brain-Body Centre, University of Illinois) was used to remove aberrant beats by linear correction, following which the cardiac VT index was calcu-lated via CardioBatch (as above). Specifically, sequential heart periods are resam-pled to 250 ms intervals (i.e. 4 Hz), producing time-based data that are detrended by a 21-point cubic moving polynomial (Porges and Bohrer, 1990), which is used to

Graph 1. Change in measured heart rate during exposure.

Graph 2. Change in vagal tone during exposure.

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template-smooth the original series. The detrended series is bandpassed to determine the variance associated with the spontaneous breathing rate of an adult participant (0.12–0.4 Hz).

Procedure

Participants completed their initial PANAS, followed by viewing their designated videos depending on condition (WJ or PJ), which were always in the same order (first the asy-lum story, or vignette, designated hereafter as ASYL, then the Israel–Palestine story or ISPAL). Questionnaires (qualitative, PANAS and ERQ) were answered after each video.

Analysis

Variables from baseline were assessed with repeated-measures analysis of variance, with simple contrasts to baseline for the vignette conditions. Where Mauchly’s test for sphe-ricity was significant, the Huynh–Feldt correction was used. Individual difference vari-ables were assessed with Pearson’s correlation. Follow-up comparisons were performed with Student’s t test.

Basic VT effects

The loss of VT during the ASYL stimuli (p = .053) and ISPAL stimuli (p = .006) from base-line was observed in the overall contrast, but neither interaction was significant, indicat-ing that VT fell somewhat uniformly between vignettes and WJ versus PJ conditions.

Basic heart rate effects

Both groups had consistently different baseline values (p < .01) – this is most likely due to individual differences. The slowing of the heart over time (i.e. loss of heart period) is relatively consistent in both groups, with no relevant interactions reported overall. This is consistent with the nature of an experimental task in the first place (i.e. sitting still for a prolonged period). This was such that the overall contrast for ISPAL versus BASEL, common between PJ and WJ viewers, was significant (p = .002).

PANAS positive/negative overall

Participants reported significant contrasts overall between (a) both vignettes and (b) both the decrease in positive and increase in negative mood (all ps < .01). This is entirely con-sistent with the subject matter being unpleasant or confronting. The loss of VT overall during the vignettes, the increase in negative affect and decrease in positive affect are all consistent with the serious/conflictual nature of the stimuli.

ERQ results

ERQ scores were considered as individual difference variables as both raw and subscale scores.


ERQ versus VT

No correlations were significant in the ASYL condition between VT change and any ERQ measure. Overall VT change versus ERQ score was very marginally significant (p = .11) in the ISPAL condition; however, this was entirely the result of the WJ VT change versus ERQ correlation being comfortably significant (r = −.405, p = .018), while PJ VT change versus ERQ was unchanged (r = −.013; see Graph 3).

When the ERQ scores were split into sub-groups, empathy (r = −.334), distress (r = −.390) and injustice (r = −.349) scores were all at least close to significant. While this may support a central role for self-reported distress as the primary correlate of dimin-ished VT, as the correlation is highest, the distress–VT correlation was not significantly greater than the other subscales (Fisher’s r-to-z transformation; distress > empathy, z = .46, p = .323; distress > injustice, z = −.56, p = .288; p values one-tailed).

Our hypotheses did predict decreased VT in parallel with increased ERQ score, but did not extend as far as the reasons for or structure of this relationship. Assuming that emotional regulation is involved, this perhaps reveals a qualitative difference between ‘strong’ and ‘overwhelming’ feelings. As a consequence, the ERQ scores were re-coded as the number of times participants reported ‘A lot’ or ‘Extremely’ sympathetic/upset/disturbed and so on (no. 5 or 7 on the Likert scale).

The correlation between VT change during viewing the WJ condition and the presence of any strong emotion was significant (r = −.475). The scatterplot shows the linear regression, which shows a steady decrease in VT with the amount of times a strong feeling was reported.

However, it might be argued that instead of a correlation being used, this represents a binary characteristic (i.e. presence vs absence of strong emotion), as many participants did not report any strong emotions (15 of the 32 included J participants) and thus a follow-up t test was conducted (two-tailed, equal variances not assumed), which was also significant (p = .024). Only two participants (out of 17) who reported the presence of a strong emotion increased in VT during the War Journalism (WJ) condition – that is, 15/17 decreased in VT. None of the equivalent overall or sub-group correlations in the Peace Journalism (PJ) conditions was significant.

Graph 3. Overall VT change versus ERQ score.

Lynch et al. 215

Interpretation

War framing significantly changes the emotional valence, empathic content or similar of the ISPAL vignette. The result within the ISPAL data is quite clear and is significant in parallel analyses. This fits quite clearly with the overall place of HRV within biobehavioural models – namely, that it can be used as a correlate of emotional responding or regulation.

Conclusion

Any conclusions from this highly speculative phase of the research must be regarded as provisional and requiring to be tested by further experiments before being regarded as reli-able. However, these psychophysiological measures were applied only by way of follow-ing what were already abundant clues, indicating a strong interaction, from the application in Phase 1 of the experiment of other methods: the DES questionnaire, TLP and FGDs.

Taken together, they should be seen as parts of a response, for PJ, to one of the early critiques, made by Thomas Hanitzsch in a special edition of the PJ ‘house journal’, Conflict and Communication, for which contributors were invited to put objections to the PJ model and approach, or respond to them. In this, Hanitzsch (2008) argued that PJ exponents accorded too much importance to media frames and prospects for influ-encing them through a programme of reform, with audiences modelled as ‘a passive mass that needs to be enlightened by virtue of right and proper reporting’ (p. 77).

So, the findings here can be seen as an attempt to peer beneath the bonnet of audience responses, to perceive and investigate the formation of audience frames in response to different stimuli in the form of differently coded reports of conflict. The findings from Phase 1 of the experiment on Australian audiences may be regarded as useful indicators, if limited by the difficulties of interpretation and transmission listed above. Taken together with these indicative, if tentative, results from Phase 2, however, they indicate the extent of influence of media frames on the cognitive and emotional responses of television news viewers and can be taken as validation of the PJ strategic aim to prompt and equip readers and audiences ‘to consider and value non-violent responses to conflict’ (Lynch and McGoldrick, 2005: 5).

Funding

This research by Jake Lynch, Annabel McGoldrick and James Heathers was funded by the Australian Research Council, part of a Linkage Project no. LP0991223, ‘A Global Standard for Reporting Conflict’, with partnership by the International Federation of Journalists and Act for Peace.

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Author biographies

Jake Lynch is Director of the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Sydney and a Senior Research Fellow at the School of Communication of the University of Johannesburg. Lynch enjoyed a near-20-year career in professional journalism before taking up an academic post. He was a Political Correspondent for Sky News, at Westminster; the Sydney correspondent for The Independent newspaper and a newsreader on BBC World TV news. He is the most published and most cited author in the field of peace journalism. During 2010–2012, he served as Secretary General of the International Peace Research Association and is now co-convener of its Peace Journalism Commission. For over 15 years, he has devised and delivered training programmes for professional editors and reporters in societies affected by violent conflict, as a form of media aid and development.

Annabel McGoldrick is a Sessional Lecturer at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies of the University of Sydney and a Research Fellow at the School of Communication of the University of Johannesburg. McGoldrick is a qualified psychotherapist in private practice as well as a regular teaching contributor to the postgraduate coursework programme at the Centre for Peace and Conflict Studies at the University of Sydney. Before embarking upon these twin careers, she worked as a journalist and documentary film-maker, including production credits on the BBC documentary, Stop the War, presented by Harold Pinter, and on the multi-award winning Soldiers of Peace, narrated by Michael Douglas. Her last journalistic post was as a reporter on SBS World News Australia. With Jake Lynch, she is the co-author of Peace Journalism, which launched the field of the same name in 2005.

James Heathers is a PhD candidate in the Psychology Department of the University of Sydney. In 2015, he was awarded a prestigious Endeavour Research Fellowship, which is an internationally competitive, merit-based award to enable Australian recipients to undertake study, research and professional development programmes overseas.

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