Dr. Lucia Cores Sarria (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, Spain): "The Paradox of Negative News: 
Disentangling the Dual Role of Negativity Bias 
in News Selection and Avoidance"

• Datum: 14. January 2026
• Time: 16:15
• Street: Linzer Str. 4
• Room: 60.070

Negativity in the news can be a double-edged sword: it draws attention, but it can also drive people away. This study takes a dynamic approach to show that both effects can be true. Using an online experiment in a social media–style feed, we tracked second-by-second engagement with news automatically classified by emotional valence. We found that participants initially engaged more with negative news, but this advantage faded within seconds. In contrast, positive news was more resilient to the natural decline in engagement that occurs over time. By showing that a negativity bias is short-lived and can turn into avoidance within a single social media session, this study helps reconcile mixed findings in the literature.

CV

Dr. Lucía Cores-Sarría is an MSCA YUFE postdoctoral researcher at Universidad Carlos III de Madrid, visiting ZeMKI as part of her secondment, where she collaborates with Prof. Cornelius Puschmann, her YUFE co-supervisor. She holds a joint Ph.D. in Media and Cognitive Science from Indiana University. She focuses on media psychology, employing methods that range from psychophysiological experiments to large-scale analyses of digital behavioral data. Her YUFE project investigates how the content and formal features of news drive engagement and avoidance in digital environments. Her work has been published in international journals such as the Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism Studies, and Ecological Psychology..

The abstract as download: Research-Seminar_2026-01-14_Sarria