Impacto e sensacionalismo na imprensa – a razão da emoção

Abstract

Reading the front page of a newspaper may sometimes remind visions of a chamber of horrors. Why people seem to be so attracted by headlines telling catastrophes, scandals, corruption and so on?

To illustrate the situation, we examined the titles from the front page of three daily national Portuguese newspapers. Titles were sorted into fields and emotional connotations, so we could picture a real situation.

Based on the evolutionary approach of Emotions, that emphasizes its communicational relevance, we considered that human beings have had to be constantly very aware of changes and threats from the environment in order to survive, and so we link the attention to negative headlines to atavistic life preservation behavior.