“May I have your attention, please?"

A new study carried out using eye-tracking technology suggests that people are more prone to be attentive to negative comments on social media than that positive ones.

The study was titled, “May I have your Attention, please? An eye tracking study on emotional social media comments," and was authored by Susann Kohout, Sanne Kruikemeier, and Bert N. Bakker.

The study, which was published in the Computers in Human Behavior journal, found that social media posts are inclined to have "emotional comments" that tend to be more negative, which might cause cynicism about the source of the post and polarity among users.

The study, conducted by Susann Kohout and her colleagues, examined the length to which users engaged with different types of content: positive, angry, fearful, and negative content, and to what extent they remember emotional posts they come against on social media platforms.

169 students were presented with "artificial news stories" that were designed to depict actual Facebook content while subject to an eye-tracking tool and then were asked to identify what they consider the stories to be: emotional, non-emotional, positive, negative, angry, or fearful.

The participants were split into two separate groups: the heuristic processing group and the systematic processing group.

The first group was only allowed to take 30 seconds to read each post, while there were no time limits set for the second group which was allowed to carefully read and examine the stories.

The first measure aimed to reflect the low-effort processing that individuals adopt while scrolling social media.

The eye-tracking tool observed and recorded the students' visual movement and attention, especially the time period each of them took on each comment and whether they visually revisited it while still on the same post.

The results revealed that students of the first group (heuristic processing condition) were more attentive to negative comments and had a loner visual fixation on them.

According to the researchers, the results indicate that when participants were obligated to quickly read the comments, they focused more on the negative rather than the positive ones.

The authors however recognized that the findings are expected standard as human nature tends to have a bias for negative information and give them more importance over positive ones.

While the students dwelled more on negative posts, this did not increase the probability that they would recognize the information in these posts, suggesting that they might be suppressing the information in order for them to forget it.

On the other hand, the students of the second group (systematic processing group) recorded longer visual fixation on angry comments compared to fearful ones, indicating that when readers are left with no time cap to view a story, they tended to read and recall the post details of angry comments rather than the fearful comments.

“First, we have shown that it is important to distinguish discrete negative emotions (e.g., anger versus fear), as they can affect readers in significantly different ways,” Kohout and her colleagues said.

The authors pointed out, despite the important insights that could be concluded from the results, however, that the study is not conclusive and it should be more comprehensive in the future, for this one was unable to take into consideration a larger spectrum of emotions and social media interfaces (Facebook) or to control the order of the comments.

“Future research can build on our study by testing the effects of different emotions, emotional cues, and processing strategies as well as different news providers, formats, and topics. Second, due to effects as information, future research should consider how emotionally invested people might get when reading comments, and how this might affect their information processing.”