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Facing the Competition: Gender Differences in Facial Emotion and Prominence in Visual News Coverage of Democratic Presidential Primary Candidates
Abstract
This study considered the impact of gender on visual coverage of the top 12 candidates in the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary. Using Microsoft Azure’s Face API, we analyzed 9,529 still images from 43 mainstream news sources for facial emotion (happiness, anger, neutrality) and prominence (close-up, medium, long shots). We found visual evidence for an age-old narrative that undermines confidence in women’s leadership fitness: They were presented as emotionally less composed than men. Although we found no gender differences for facial prominence per se, its interaction with facial emotion gave nuance to gender differences in visual coverage of leadership performances.
In the 2020 Democratic Presidential Primary campaigns, six women, the most in history, announced their candidacy for the presidency. Using computational topic modeling and network analysis of 84,000 newspaper articles (2.2 million paragraphs), we analyze how gender and electability was discussed during the Primaries. Results reveal that male candidates, and especially Joe Biden, were frequently compared with the incumbent, Donald Trump, while coverage of female candidates focused directly on social policy. Trump’s attack on Biden during the impeachment process produced a lasting effect by promoting discourse topics traditionally dominated by men. This crowded out the topics emphasized by women, such as health care and education. Women candidates’ press coverage was also more reactionary than men’s. Although explicit reference to gender as a discourse topic has decreased, which suggests growing gender parity within the political process, gendered policy salience emerges transitively in comparison with the incumbent. Transitive policy salience emerges as a key explanatory variable that articulates the indirect path media coverage can lead to the marginalization of women candidates.
A bstract
Several empirical studies have linked political candidates’ electoral success to their physical appearance. We reexamine the effects of candidates’ physical attractiveness by taking into account emotional facial expressions as measured by automated facial recognition software. The analysis is based on an observational case study of candidate characteristics in the 2017 German federal election. Using hierarchical regression modeling and controlling for candidates’ displays of happiness, consistent effects of physical attractiveness remain. The results suggest that a potential interaction effect between displays of happiness and attractiveness positively affects vote shares. The study emphasizes the importance of considering emotional expressions when analyzing the impact of candidate appearance on electoral outcomes.
Voters evaluate politicians not just by what they say, but also how they say it, via facial displays of emotions and vocal pitch. Candidate characteristics can shape how leaders use—and how voters react to—nonverbal cues. Drawing on role congruity expectations, we study how the use of and reactions to facial, vocal, and textual communication in political debates varies by candidate gender. Relying on full-length videos of four German federal election debates (2005–2017) and a minor party debate, we use video, audio, and text data to measure candidate facial displays of emotion, vocal pitch, and speech sentiment. Consistent with our expectations, Angela Merkel expresses less anger than her male opponents, but she is just as emotive in other respects. Combining these measures of emotional expression with continuous responses recorded by live audiences, we find that voters punish Merkel for anger displays and reward her happiness and general emotional displays.
Web search engines influence perception of social reality by filtering and ranking information. However, their outputs are often subjected to bias that can lead to skewed representation of subjects such as professional occupations or gender. In our paper, we use a mixed-method approach to investigate presence of race and gender bias in representation of artificial intelligence (AI) in image search results coming from six different search engines. Our findings show that search engines prioritize anthropomorphic images of AI that portray it as white, whereas non-white images of AI are present only in non-Western search engines. By contrast, gender representation of AI is more diverse and less skewed towards a specific gender that can be attributed to higher awareness about gender bias in search outputs. Our observations indicate both the need and the possibility for addressing bias in representation of societally relevant subjects, such as technological innovation, and emphasize the importance of designing new approaches for detecting bias in information retrieval systems.
Image recognition systems offer the promise to learn from images at scale without requiring expert knowledge. However, past research suggests that machine learning systems often produce biased output. In this article, we evaluate potential gender biases of commercial image recognition platforms using photographs of U.S. members of Congress and a large number of Twitter images posted by these politicians. Our crowdsourced validation shows that commercial image recognition systems can produce labels that are correct and biased at the same time as they selectively report a subset of many possible true labels. We find that images of women received three times more annotations related to physical appearance. Moreover, women in images are recognized at substantially lower rates in comparison with men. We discuss how encoded biases such as these affect the visibility of women, reinforce harmful gender stereotypes, and limit the validity of the insights that can be gathered from such data.
Previous research on the success of politicians' messages on social media has so far focused on a limited number of platforms, especially Facebook and Twitter, and predominately studied the effects of textual content. This research reported here applies computer vision analysis to a total of 59,020 image posts published by 172 Instagram accounts of U.S. politicians, both candidates and office holders, and examines how visual attributes influence audience engagement such as likes and comments. In particular, this study introduces an unsupervised approach that combines transfer learning and clustering techniques to discover hidden categories from large-scale visual data. The results reveal that different self-personalization strategies in visual media, for example, images featuring politicians in private, nonpolitical settings, showing faces, and displaying emotions, generally increase audience engagement. Yet, a significant portion of politician's Instagram posts still fell into the traditional, "politics-as-usual" type of political communication, showing professional settings and activities. The analysis explains how self-personalization is embodied in specific visual portrayals and how different self-presentation strategies affect audience engagement on a popular but less studied social media platform.
The literature on public figures attacked by their audiences is unclear why female and male figures react differently to attacks. This study examines why female journalists are more likely than male journalists to use avoidance strategies as a reaction to online attacks. Avoidance includes limiting audience engagement, adapting reporting behavior, and thinking about quitting journalism. Drawing on social role theory and gender stereotypes, this study contrasts two explanatory hypotheses. The results, based on mediation analyses of online survey data of 637 journalists representative of Switzerland, show that women are more likely than men to use avoidance strategies because women are more stressed by attacks. This heightened stress is argued to result from differences in gender role socialization. In contrast, while women are somewhat more severely attacked than men, this cannot explain their greater probability of avoidance. Results contribute a theoretically and empirically rich explanation of gendered reactions to attacks.
How do today’s partisan media outlets produce ideological bias in their visual coverage of political candidates? Applying computer vision techniques, this study examined 13,026 images from 15 news websites about the two candidates in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. The analysis unveils a set of visual attributes (e.g., facial expressions, face size, skin condition) that were adopted by media outlets of varying ideologies to differentially portray these two candidates. In addition, this study recruited 596 crowdsourced workers to rate a subset of 1,200 images and demonstrated that some visual features also effectively shape viewers’ perceptions of media slant and impressions of the candidates. For example, Clinton was portrayed with more expressions of happiness, which rendered her as more favorable, whereas Trump was associated with more expressions of anger, which made him look less positive but more dominant. These differences in facial expressions varied in line with media outlets’ political leanings.
Men are presented with higher facial prominence than women in the media, a phenomenon that is called face-ism. In naturalistic settings, face-ism effects could be driven by gender biases of photographers and/or by gender differences in self-presentation. The present research is the first to investigate whether women and men themselves create this different facial prominence. In a controlled laboratory study, 61 participants prepared a picture of themselves from a half-body photograph, allegedly to be uploaded to their profile for an online professional network. As expected, men cropped their photos with higher facial prominence than women did. However, women and men did not differ in the self-presentational motivations, goals, strategies, and personality variables under investigation, so that the observed face-ism effect could not be explained with these variables. Generally, the higher participants' physical appearance self-esteem, the higher was their self-created facial prominence.
As ethnographic studies of the visual gatekeeping process at newsrooms are scarce and the increasingly digitised news era demands for reconsideration, this article focuses on the results of a qualitative study at the photo news desk of a Flemish newspaper in Belgium. Our aim has been to provide an update and a broadening of previous studies on visual gatekeeping processes, and the findings are based on observations, in-depth interviews and reconstructions of the visual selection process. Our results show that routine and organisational influences as the ‘newsroom culture’ and the ‘rhythm’ of the newspaper outweigh individual preferences of photo editors. In-house photographers are systematically preferred to wire photographs. The information value of photos prevails, but aesthetics and good taste add another layer of deliberation. In addition, layout policies explicitly steer photo editors in their decision-making process.
The present study analyzed whether the face-ism phenomenon, which argues that the media visually depict men with more facial prominence compared to women (whereas women are shown with greater body prominence), exists for self-selected photographs worldwide. Based on a content analysis of a sample of 6286 profile photos drawn from online dating sites in seven countries (Austria, Denmark, Hungary, Japan, Netherlands, Sweden, and the United States) in 2013, we did not find any overall gender differences in facial prominence. However, further analysis showed gender differences in facial prominence for certain age groups: whereas there were no gender differences in the 25–41 year-old age group, young women between 18 and 24 had a higher facial prominence than men, and men older than 41 had higher facial prominence than women. These changes by age are driven by a pattern wherein facial prominence generally remains stable for men, but declines for women with age. In short, older users follow more traditional gender depictions in accordance with the face-ism phenomenon, whereas among younger people, women sport an even higher facial prominence than men do. In contrast to this significant interaction between gender and age in facial prominence, we found no significant interaction between culture (as measured by Hofstede’s masculinity dimension) and gender, which indicates that culture plays no discernible role in gender differences in facial prominence, possibly because macro-level sexism (Hofstede’s masculinity dimension) and micro-level sexism (photographs of individuals online) are not the same.
One emerging form of communication discussed in the present article is the use of visual self-representation as a tool for symbolic interaction between young people on the Internet. Using examples of difference and similarity in young women’s and men’s visual self-representation, the article offers an interpretation of these practices, pointing towards both new visual conventions and references to pre-existing media representations, thus revealing a process of hypervisuality. In this process of transformation, the involvement of new technologies, such as webcam aesthetics and its form of intimacy and authenticity, produces specific visual conventions within the frame of pre-existing media imagery, when the self is presented in online communication.
The deceptively simple question “What is news?” remains pertinent even as we ponder the future of journalism in the digital age. This article examines news values within mainstream journalism and considers the extent to which news values may be changing since earlier landmark studies were undertaken. Its starting point is Harcup and O'Neill's widely cited 2001 updating of Galtung and Ruge's influential 1965 taxonomy of news values. Just as that study put Galtung and Ruge's criteria to the test with an empirical content analysis of published news, this new study explores the extent to which Harcup and O'Neill's revised list of news values remains relevant given the challenges (and opportunities) faced by journalism today, including the emergence of social media. A review of recent literature contextualises the findings of a fresh content analysis of news values within a range of UK media 15 years on from the last study. The article concludes by suggesting a revised and updated set of contemporary news values, whilst acknowledging that no taxonomy can ever explain everything.
Image Bite Politics is the first book to systematically assess the visual presentation of presidential candidates in network news coverage of elections and to connect these visual images with shifts in public opinion. Presenting the results of a comprehensive visual analysis of general election news from 1992-2004, encompassing four presidential campaigns, the authors highlight the remarkably potent influence of television images when it comes to evaluating leaders. The book draws from a variety of disciplines, including political science, behavioral biology, cognitive neuroscience, and media studies in order to investigate the visual framing of elections in an interdisciplinary fashion. Moreover, the book presents findings that are counterintuitive and which challenge widely held assumptions; yet are supported by systematic data. For example, Republicans receive consistently more favorable visual treatment than Democrats, countering the conventional wisdom of a "liberal media bias"; and image bites are more prevalent, and in some elections more potent, in shaping voter opinions of candidates than sound bites. Finally, the authors provide a foundation for promoting visual literacy among news audiences and bring the importance of visual analysis to the forefront of research. © 2009 by Maria Elizabeth Grabe and Erik Page Bucy. All rights reserved.
People believe women are more emotional than men but it remains unclear to what extent such emotion stereotypes affect leadership perceptions. Extending the think manager-think male paradigm (Schein, 1973), we examined the similarity of emotion expression descriptions of women, men, and managers. In a field-based online experiment, 1,098 participants (male and female managers and employees) rated one of seven target groups on 17 emotions: men or women (in general, managers, or successful managers), or successful managers. Men in general are described as more similar to successful managers in emotion expression than are women in general. Only with the label manager or successful manager do women-successful manager similarities on emotion expression increase. These emotion stereotypes might hinder women’s leadership success.
The smiles and affiliative expressions of presidential candidates are important for political success, allowing contenders to nonverbally connect with potential supporters and bond with followers. Smiles, however, are not unitary displays; they are multifaceted in composition and signaling intent due to variations in performance. With this in mind, we examine the composition and perception of smiling behavior by Republican presidential candidates during the 2012 preprimary period. In this paper we review literature concerning different smile types and the muscular movements that compose them from a biobehavioral perspective. We then analyze smiles expressed by Republican presidential candidates early in the 2012 primary season by coding facial muscle activity at the microlevel using the Facial Action Coding System (FACS) to produce an inventory of politically relevant smile types. To validate the subtle observed differences between smile types, we show viewers a series of short video clips to differentiate displays on the basis of their perceived reassurance, or social signaling. The discussion considers the implications of our findings in relation to political evaluation and communication efficacy.
Using Goffman’s notions of self-presentation and gender displays, the following study examines
the Instagram feeds of 27 professional athletes to determine how athletes are using the visual
social media site for self-presentation. A mixed methods approach examined the photographs
and captions to determine what behaviors and themes emerged. Through content analysis, the
self-presentation styles of athletes of both genders, as well as the main differences between them
were examined, and significant differences emerged that confirmed the previously established
gender norms. Through textual analysis, findings with respect to captions align with previous
research on athlete self-presentation on social media. Theoretical and practical implications, as
well as directions for future research are discussed.
The head-body ratios of more than 1400 profile pictures of seven different nations were analyzed to test differences in facial prominence in the profile photos posted on social networking sites. The social psychology theory of face-ism was used to measure the head-body ratio of men and women. Results show that men were significantly higher in facial prominence than women, suggesting social gender stereotypes are internalized cross-culturally by individuals and influence their choice of photographs. Nationality was found to play a role in the face-ism indexes, with some nations displaying more of a gap in indexes between genders than others. The study shows that gender stereotypes still exist across cultures despite the self-selection ability of users.
We investigate the origins of voters' expectations of greater female competency on ''compassion'' issues, such as dealing with poverty or the aged, and greater male competency on military and defense issues. We contrast two alternative explanations: gender-trait stereotypes, emphasizing a candidate's gender-linked personality traits; and gender-belief stereotypes, placing greatest importance on the differing political outlooks of male and female candidates. We test contrasting predictions from these two approaches with data from an experiment in which 297 undergraduate participants were randomly assigned to hear about a male or a female candidate with typically masculine or feminine traits. Overall, there was stronger support for the trait approach. Warm and expressive candidates were seen as better at compassion issues; instrumental candidates were rated as more competent to handle the military and economic issues. Moreover, masculine instrumental traits increased the candidate's perceived competence on a broader range of issues than the feminine traits of warmth and expressiveness. Finally, there was some limited support for the belief approach with gender-based expectations about the candidates' political views affecting their rated competency on compassion but not other types of political issues.
This research investigated the impact of teacher caring and teacher immediacy on student perceptions of teachers' credibility. While the results of the two studies conducted indicated the presence of strong main effects for teacher caring and immediacy and strong negative effects for teacher non‐caring and nonimmediacy on the various dimensions of teacher credibility (as hypothesized), significant interaction effects were observed between caring and nonimmediacy on both dimensions of credibility studied (competence and trustworthiness). In most cases, when teacher caring was low, whether the teacher was in the immediate or nonimmediate condition made no significant difference—both produced negative perceptions of teacher credibility. In contrast, when teacher caring was high, teacher nonimmediacy significantly lowered perceived credibility. Probing of the interaction results suggested that high verbal caring tends to soften the negative impact of teacher nonimmediacy. The results of these studies demonstrate that teachers should maintain high verbal caring to preserve their credibility in the classroom. Implications for teacher training and suggestions for future research are discussed.
In text, images, merged surveys, voter files, and elsewhere, data sets are often missing important covariates, either because they are latent features of observations (such as sentiment in text) or because they are not collected (such as race in voter files). One promising approach for coping with this missing data is to find the true values of the missing covariates for a subset of the observations and then train a machine learning algorithm to predict the values of those covariates for the rest. However, plugging in these predictions without regard for prediction error renders regression analyses biased, inconsistent, and overconfident. We characterize the severity of the problem posed by prediction error, describe a procedure to avoid these inconsistencies under comparatively general assumptions, and demonstrate the performance of our estimators through simulations and a study of hostile political dialogue on the Internet. We provide software implementing our approach.
Images play a crucial role in shaping and reflecting political life. Digitization has vastly increased the presence of such images in daily life, creating valuable new research opportunities for social scientists. We show how recent innovations in computer vision methods can substantially lower the costs of using images as data. We introduce readers to the deep learning algorithms commonly used for object recognition, facial recognition, and visual sentiment analysis. We then provide guidance and specific instructions for scholars interested in using these methods in their own research.
Cambridge Core - American Government, Politics and Policy - The Qualifications Gap - by Nichole M. Bauer
Visual content plays a crucial role in today’s online political communication, especially during election campaigns. Prior research on candidate imagery has shown particular effects from non-verbal behavior (e.g., smiling), contextual features (e.g., the depiction of other people), and structural characteristics (e.g., camera angle and proximity). Importantly, this study argues to look at candidate imagery as institutionalized means of political communication online. In the realm of the European Parliamentary Election 2019, self-promoted candidate imagery on social networking sites (SNS) is expected to align cross-nationally along party-family structures vis-à-vis respective imagery in the news, which is anticipated to align along national borders. We analyze and describe respective candidate imagery in both news and SNS from 13,811 unique candidates across all 28 European member states by means of a computational content analysis of 79,500 images. After a manual two-step validation, which raises concerns about the validity of the computationally assigned camera angle, logistic regression models are used to estimate non-verbal behavior, contextual features, and structural characteristics. Findings show that while self-depiction on SNS includes more smiling, news imagery employs broader variation in camera angles and close-up photography. Differences are almost independent from structural influences with the exception of country alignment, which is a minor yet consistent predictor of all outcome variables. Visual computational content analysis has proven to be a useful and reliable utility for all but one variable – a call for its employment along strong validation also in future studies to allow visual content analyses also on a large and quantitative scale.
With the integration of social media in political communication repertoires, politicians now permanently campaign for support online. By promoting their personal agenda, politicians increasingly profile themselves independent from their associated parties on the web (i.e., self-personalization). By focusing on self-personalization as a multi-layered concept (i.e., professional, emotional, private self-personalization), this study investigates both the use and consequences of self-personalization on Facebook. A manual content analysis of politicians’ Facebook posts (N = 435) reveals that self-personalization is indeed often used as a communication style on Facebook and is most often present in visual communication. Moreover, the study shows that the use of a more emotional and private style provides a beneficial tool for politicians’ impression management. Publishing emotional and private content yields positive effects on audience engagement, suggesting audiences’ demand for more intimate and emotional impressions of public figures on the web.
According to gender role theory, women's greater emotional intensity than men's stems from normative expectations for sex differences that arise as a result of men's and women's social roles. In the 1st experiment, endorsement of normative expectations for sex differences was associated with sex differences in Ss' own emotions: To the extent that they endorsed stereotypical differences between men and women, female Ss reported personally experiencing emotions of greater intensity and male Ss reported experiencing emotions of lesser intensity. The 2nd study manipulated expectations for responsiveness while Ss viewed a series of emotion-inducing slides. When instructions rendered normative expectations comparable for men and women, no sex differences were obtained in emotion self-reports. Furthermore, women evidenced more extreme electromyograph physiological responding than men, suggesting general sex differences in emotion that are not limited to self-report.
Drawing on literature about the different television coverage of male and female politicians and gender-specific leadership behavior, differences in the visibility of female and male politicians’ emotions on television can be assumed. These assumptions are particularly relevant when considering studies on the effects of politician’s emotional displays on voters’ assessments. In order to examine the prevalence of female and male politicians’ emotions, we conducted a visual media content analysis of about 1,000 video sequences based on a sample of 66 news broadcasts. Since this comprehensive sample includes video sequences of German politicians holding various positions within the political system, it enables us to draw generalizable conclusions on the televised emotionality of leading politicians. We find that female politicians’ emotions can be seen more frequently on television than male politicians’ emotions. Moreover, female politicians’ positive emotions are shown more frequently than those of male politicians.
In wire service photos from the 1987 Wimbledon tennis tournament, male athletes were pictured as more emotional than women; women more dominated than men. Differences exist in male-female photo coverage, but there's no evidence that photographers reinforce gender stereotypes.
Does the news media cover ideological extremists more than moderates? We combine a measure of members of Congress’ ideological extremity with a content analysis of how often lawmakers appear in the New York Times from the 103rd to the 112th Congresses and on CBS and NBC’s evening newscasts in the 112th Congress. We show that ideological extremity is positively related to political news coverage for members of the House of Representatives. Generally, ideological extremity is not related to the likelihood of coverage for senators. Finally, we show that extreme Republicans are more likely to earn media attention than extreme Democrats.
The influence of appearances goes well beyond physical attractiveness and includes the surprisingly powerful impact of “face-ism” – the tendency to stereotype individuals based on their facial features. A growing body of research has revealed that these face-based social attributions bias the outcomes of labor markets and experimental economic games in ways that are hard to explain via evolutionary mating motives.
Face-ism describes a phenomenon in which men are presented with more facial prominence in images than are women. Previous theorists have ascribed this phenomenon to social causes. However, occurrence of face-ism across historical and cultural contexts suggests the possibility of biological influence. The current study aimed to explore face-ism through the intersection of social influence and biological factors via the investigation of photographs of women of different ages and social standing within the context of academia. Results show that graduate students displayed the face less prominently than both tenured and nontenured faculty. Additionally, younger women displayed the face less prominently than older women.
Previous research has shown that visual images of political candidates can influence voter perceptions. This study examines newspaper photographs of candidates to determine whether the favorableness of these pictures is related to the “political atmosphere” of individual newspapers. In particular, we examine 435 candidate photographs from several races covered by seven newspapers during the 1998 and 2002 general election seasons. Based on our analysis, we conclude that candidates endorsed by a particular newspaper—or whose political leanings match the political atmosphere of a given paper—generally have more favorable photographs of them published than their opponents.
The belief that women are more emotional than men is one of the strongest gender stereotypes held in Western cultures (Shields, 2002). And yet, gender stereotypes of emotion have received little attention from gender and leadership scholars. In this paper, I review the existing research on gender and emotions and propose that gender stereotypes of emotion present a fundamental barrier to women's ability to ascend to and succeed in leadership roles. I first define the nature of people's gender-emotion stereotypes and outline why perceptions of emotionality may be particularly detrimental to women when they are in high-status positions in work contexts. I then suggest that gender-emotion stereotypes create two complex minefields that female, but not male, leaders have to navigate in order to be successful: (1) identifying how much emotion should be displayed and (2) identifying what kind of emotions should be displayed. Specifically, female leaders can be penalized for even minor or moderate displays of emotion, especially when the emotion conveys dominance (e.g., anger or pride), but being emotionally unexpressive may also result in penalties because unemotional women are seen as failing to fulfill their warm, communal role as women. I conclude by considering the interactive role of race and ethnicity with regards to gender stereotypes of emotion and proposing avenues for future research.
Objective:
Intraclass correlation coefficient (ICC) is a widely used reliability index in test-retest, intrarater, and interrater reliability analyses. This article introduces the basic concept of ICC in the content of reliability analysis.
Discussion for researchers:
There are 10 forms of ICCs. Because each form involves distinct assumptions in their calculation and will lead to different interpretations, researchers should explicitly specify the ICC form they used in their calculation. A thorough review of the research design is needed in selecting the appropriate form of ICC to evaluate reliability. The best practice of reporting ICC should include software information, "model," "type," and "definition" selections.
Discussion for readers:
When coming across an article that includes ICC, readers should first check whether information about the ICC form has been reported and if an appropriate ICC form was used. Based on the 95% confident interval of the ICC estimate, values less than 0.5, between 0.5 and 0.75, between 0.75 and 0.9, and greater than 0.90 are indicative of poor, moderate, good, and excellent reliability, respectively.
Conclusion:
This article provides a practical guideline for clinical researchers to choose the correct form of ICC and suggests the best practice of reporting ICC parameters in scientific publications. This article also gives readers an appreciation for what to look for when coming across ICC while reading an article.
Campaigns are strategic contests between candidates and reporters. While candidates have proven to be adept at gaming news coverage of their campaign advertisements, journalists have maintained their autonomy by curtailing coverage of the candidates' stump speeches. The advent of online media, however, advantages the candidates by permitting direct communication between candidates and voters.
Television has become the central medium of communication in modern politics. The way in which leaders are presented to the public on TV shapes and measures their status, and their power can no longer be fully understood without reference to television coverage. This article, based on a cross-national study of nightly newscasts in Germany, France, and the United States, finds that the frequency with which the images of leaders appear on TV reflects the different patterns of political dominance in the three nations. The authors link this to different social and political systems and analyze the implications for leadership.
The study of news values/factors has a long and rich history in journalism and communications research. Conceptually, they encompass not only the newsworthy aspects of happenings or news actors but also external aspects that impact journalism practice, such as the influence of proprietors or advertisers, meeting deadlines or competition among news providers to get exclusive stories. Some view news values as existing in the actual events and people who are reported on in the news, that is, in events in their material reality (a material perspective). Others conceive news values as existing in the minds of journalists (a cognitive perspective). News values are also constructed in the discourses involved in the production of news (a discursive perspective). The focus in this article is on this third perspective, with the aim of demonstrating what a discursive approach to news values can add to the two other, theoretical and analytical perspectives. The article has an additional focus on the much neglected area of visual analysis and investigates the construction of news values in news photography.
Recent literature largely dismisses the notion that voters engage in direct bias against women based on sex alone. Making a distinction between sex and gender, our theoretical expectations predict that female candidates who violate gender norms for marriage and motherhood will receive lower candidate evaluations, particularly so among voters who hold conservative beliefs about the proper role of women. We use a survey experiment to estimate the direct and conditional effects of gender traits and gender role beliefs on evaluations. Our results support the proposition that candidate traits, such as marital and parental status, can prime gender beliefs in the evaluative process.
Do facial gestures of leaders elicit emotional responses that have important effects on public attitudes? Using a research design based on social psychology and ethology, videotaped excerpts of all candidates in the 1984 presidential election were carefully selected and shown to experimental groups in January and October 1984. Neutral and happy/reassuring facial displays of different candidates were found to vary in the emotions they elicited. For both samples, changes in viewers' attitudes were more likely to be influenced by the emotional responses to happy/reassuring displays than by such cognitive variables as party identification, issue agreement, or assessment of leadership ability. Since this effect was found whether excerpts were seen with or without the sound, viewers' emotional reactions cannot be attributed to verbal messages or paravocal cues.
This study is concerned with the news values and working practices that inform the creation of interactive infographics in UK online news. The author draws upon organisational theory in journalism studies, and considers how conventional journalistic news values compare with best practice as espoused in different literatures within this field. A series of open-ended, depth interviews with visual news journalists from the UK national media were undertaken, along with a short-term observation case study at a national online news publisher. Journalistic and organisational norms are found to shape the selection, production, and treatment of interactive graphics, and a degree of variation is found to exist amongst practitioners as to definitions of quality in this field. Some news stories are considered to be better suited to rendering in interactive form than others. The availability of “big data” does not drive decision-making in itself, but some numbers are considered more newsworthy than others. Budgetary constraint drives practice and limits potential in this field. Risk aversion, embodied in various forms; from the use of templates, to a perceived need to avoid audience complaint, is found to dampen experimentation. Detailed audience research was found to inform the choice of methods used in data visualisation at one national news producer. This warrants further investigation as to how audiences engage with news interactives, and what the framing of news in certain (preferred) data visualisation formats means in terms of how news is understood.
Previous research indicated a ‘face-ism’ bias in media depictions of men and women: me media tend to represent men with their faces, whereas women's depictions include larger parts of their bodies, rendering their faces less prominent. To explore the impact of facial prominence on impression formation, male and female subjects received either full-body or portrait-style photographs, made from the same negatives, of male and female stimulus persons of different likeability. Male and female subjects evaluated all stimulus persons as more competent (intelligent, assertive, ambitious, etc.) if presented with a high (portrait) rather than a low (full-body photograph) degree of facial prominence. This main effect of facial prominence was not qualified by interaction effects with any of the other variables. PIUS, the media's face-ism bias is likely to contribute to a perception of men as more competent than women. In addition, female but not male subjects also evaluated stimulus persons as more expressive and likeable under conditions of high facial prominence, reflecting a global positive effect of facial prominence.
Women are visually depicted with lower facial prominence than men, with consequences for perceptions of their competence. The current study examines the relationship between the size of this “face-ism” bias (i.e., individual or micro-level sexism) and a number of gender inequality indicators (i.e., institutional or macro-level sexism) at the cross-cultural level. In one of the largest known face-ism databases to date, the authors used politicians’ official online photographs as stimuli (N = 6,610) to explore how face-ism (as an example of individual-level sexism) covaries with institutional sexism across 25 cultures. The authors found that the face-ism bias was greater in cultures with lower levels of institutional gender inequality, demonstrating that institutional equality does not necessarily imply equality on the individual level. The authors offer a number of potential speculations for this mismatch. For example, it may be due to “postfeminist” backlash that occurs in response to decreases in level of institutional sexism or it may be due to different comparative processes that occur in more versus less gender-equal cultures. Implications for female politicians cross-culturally are discussed. The findings of our study provide empirical evidence to demonstrate how macro-level structural equalities could be related to individual and micro-level sexism, and how different levels of sexism might not necessarily be indicative of each other. Additional online materials for this article are available to PWQ subscribers on PWQ's website at http://pwq.sagepub.com/supplemental.
This article presents a four-category framework to characterize the contents of prescriptive gender stereotypes. The framework distinguishes between prescriptions and proscriptions that are intensified by virtue of one's gender, and those that are relaxed by virtue of one's gender. Two studies examined the utility of this framework for characterizing prescriptive gender stereotypes in American society (Study 1) and in the highly masculine context of Princeton University (Study 2). The results demonstrated the persistence of traditional gender prescriptions in both contexts, but also revealed distinct areas of societal vigilance and leeway for each gender. In addition, they showed that women are seen more positively, relative to societal standards, than are men. We consider the implications of this framework for research on reactions to gender stereotype deviants and sex discrimination.
Dynamic stereotypes characterize social groups that are thought to have changed from the attributes they manifested in the past and even to continue to change in the future. According to social role theory’s assumption that the role behavior of group members shapes their stereotype, groups should have dynamic stereotypes to the extent that their typical social roles are perceived to change over time. Applied to men and women, this theory makes two predictions about perceived change: (a) perceivers should think that sex differences are eroding because of increasing similarity of the roles of men and women and (b) the female stereotype should be particularly dynamic because of greater change in the roles of women than of men. This theory was tested and confirmed in five experiments that examined perceptions of the roles and the personality, cognitive, and physical attributes of men and women of the past, present, and future.
A preference for viewing men's faces and women's bodies in pictorial media has been termed “face‐ism.” The present study examined differences in the framing of men and women in a sample of prime time commercial network television programs and hypothesized that differences would be enhanced in single camera shows. Results confirmed the presence of face‐ism in prime time television, but did not find differences in single versus multiple camera productions.
In this article, the authors integrate the seemingly disparate literature on culture and emotion by offering a biocultural model of emotion that offers three premises heretofore not introduced in the literature: (1) emotions need to be distinguished from other affective phenomena, (2) different types of emotions exist, and (3) within any emotion different domains can be studied. Previous controversies have occurred because writers have called all affective states “emotion” without regard to the type or domain of emotion sampled. The authors argue that not all affective states should be called emotion, that emotions that may be biologically innate are different than those that are not, and that different domains of emotion are more relatively influenced by biology or culture. The authors offer researchers a terminology—biological versus cultural emotions, Priming Reactions, Subjective Experience, and Emotional Meanings—provide hypotheses concerning the relative contributions of biology and culture, review the available literature that supports those hypotheses, and argue that the literature can be somewhat neatly integrated into a cohesive whole. The authors contend that the relative contribution of biological and cultural factors to emotion depends on what emotion is being studied and the specific domain of emotion assessed. While the authors acknowledge that their delineations are not the only or the best delineations that can or should be used, they contend that some kind of delineations should be made and can help to synthesize and integrate a large and seemingly disparate, contradictory literature. The authors offer theirs as a first step in this effort.