The Influences of Loaded Words in Tragic News Headlines on Readers’ Emotions

Abstract

In tragic news, the use of loaded words is one prominent device in constructing effective news headlines to draw interests and provoke readers’ emotions (Clark, 2007). Nevertheless, with a dearth of research studies in this phenomenon, the aims of this qualitative study are to investigate 1) what word classes of loaded words are found in tragic news headlines, and 2) how these loaded words provoke emotions and reactions in news readers. First, 180 tragic news headlines were purposively selected from all news headlines on nine websites between July to October 2019 and analyzed. The findings revealed that nouns and verbs were the two most prominent word classes used as loaded words (48.18% and 33.64%, respectively). Moreover, these loaded words were found at both word and phrase levels. Second, to explore news readers’ emotions, the two main instruments were used: 1) online questionnaire with 20 news headlines were uploaded, finally, 52 male and female respondents from 22 countries participated and 2) semi-structured interview with 4 (7.69%) interviewees was conducted with another 20 news headlines to explore more in-depth responses. Their overall reflections revealed that, with the impacts of loaded expressions, four related main factors helped provoke their emotions: 1) strong emotive meanings of loaded words, 2) textual context of a news headline, 3) news readers’ experiences, and 4) news readers’ cultural and social backgrounds. Overall, this seems to suggest that not the use of loaded words alone is a prominent language device in creating enough impacts in writing news headlines, but textual and socio-cultural contexts also play essential roles in provoking their emotions and influencing further reactions. That is, news writers should be aware that integrating these strategies together is very important in writing news headlines.