Media Induced Fear and Anxiety - Georgetown University: Web ...

of risk factors by presenting graphics of victims. They further heighten fears by using
tactics like warning ‘those who say it is too small a risk to worry about’ to look at
graphic visuals of the distraught victims, devastation to someone’s home or stomach
turning videos of disfigured patients. While print journalists only describe in words the
actions of a story, television media make use of special effects to graphically depict the
issue or to generate dramatic reenactments of an event. 46
SOCIAL COGNITION
As discussed in the previous chapter, negative cognitions play a significant role
in the development of anxiety disorders. In addition, as noted above, negative images
seem to dominate media content. Social cognition research attempts to open the “black
box” that operates between a stimulus and a response. 47 There are two important
interrelated principles underlying social cognition research: the heuristic/sufficiency
principle, which concerns what information is retrieved in the course of constructing a
judgment, and the principle of accessibility, which concerns the role of the accessibility
of information in the construction of judgments. 48
In regards to the heuristic/sufficiency principle, there are a number of factors that
may influence how easily something is recalled, and certain ones have implications for
media effects. To start, the frequency and recency of construct activation can have
significant influence on a person’s cognitions. Generally, the more frequently and
recently a construct is activated, the easier it is to recall and recognize. Considering that
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