Do emotions conquer facts? A CCME model for the impact of emotional information on implicit attitudes in the post-truth era

This study aimed to examine the influence of emotional media information on information-processing mechanisms in the current post-truth era. A cognitive conflict monitoring and evaluation (CCME) model was proposed to explore news audiences’ attention and implicit attitudes. The study had a 2 (information type, emotional vs. neutral) × 2 (condition, compatible vs. incompatible) × 3 (electrode position: Fz vs. Cz vs. Pz) design, and an implicit association test (IAT) was administered, with event-related potential (ERP) data collected. The results revealed that emotional information evoked different information-processing mechanisms than neutral information. First, in the early conflict-monitoring stage, emotional information altered arousal, and more attentional resources were allocated to semantic processing. Second, in the late evaluation stage, the lack of attentional resources (due to prior allocation) reduced the late-stage evaluation of the target stimuli by participants. Thus, in this post-truth era, attentional resources may be exhausted by processing emotional information in unnecessary media cues irrelevant to facts, inducing early cognitive conflict and prolonged late-stage evaluation of news articles.