An Adelphi study found that watching negative news didn't make people more cautious. The researchers argue that results like this one, where no effect turns up, still move science forward.
Does feeling bad about the news have any effect on our decision-making? Research from an Adelphi undergraduate and faculty member introduces a new perspective on the topic—and it’s one neither of them anticipated.
Luis Sebastian Garcia Campos ’24, now a doctoral student in the Gordon F. Derner School of Psychology, worked with Karolina Lempert, PhD, assistant professor of psychology, to explore the relationship between negative news consumption and our willingness to make risky (where probabilities are known) or ambiguous (where probabilities are unknown) decisions.
While previous studies have found that negative emotions can increase our aversion to risk and ambiguity, many of these studies relied on static stimuli, like images, to influence participants’ emotions. Dr. Lempert and Garcia Campos were curious to see how people would respond to a more dynamic form of stimulation: the news. Negative news consumption has been shown, in separate studies, to reliably induce negative affect.
Garcia Campos was the one to conceive of the project. A keen reader, he has translated his love of narrative into lines of scholarly inquiry, seeking to “explore how people interpret neutral events based on their own experiences and perceptions.” His collaboration with Dr. Lempert was endowed by Adelphi’s Emerging Scholars Program, which offers psychology majors the opportunity to conduct original research alongside a faculty mentor. “The program places the student in a leadership role with professional mentorship from an expert in the field,” Garcia Campos said. “I always say that my favorite experience as an undergraduate at Adelphi was the Emerging Scholars Program, and I cannot recommend it enough.”
Together, Garcia Campos and Dr. Lempert designed a study that would assess participants’ affect after being shown short news videos. “He handled a lot of the legwork,” Dr. Lempert remembered. In addition to building the experiment in Qualtrics, Garcia Campos recruited participants for the study, cleaned the data, performed the analysis and wrote the first draft of the now-published paper.
During the experiment, the “negative news” experimental group watched a video of a car crash, while the “neutral news” control group watched a video about a change in train schedules. All participants then completed two assignments: first, a questionnaire about their current levels of positive and negative affect; second, a risky decision-making task and an ambiguous decision-making task.
Garcia Campos and Dr. Lempert speculated that the participants who watched the car crash video would display more aversion to risk and ambiguity. But the results indicated otherwise, even when they repeated the study with a larger participant pool. Neither study revealed a difference in risk avoidance between the negative and neutral groups.
The two were surprised by the null results. Rather than treating the project as a failure, however, they saw it as an opportunity. “Our study reinforces that this is a complex question, and there are no easy answers when it comes to how emotions shape choice,” Dr. Lempert noted. “It’s possible that people were able to attribute their negative feelings entirely to the video, so they knew that those feelings weren’t relevant to the decision-making task. It’s also possible that different kinds of negative emotions have different effects on decision-making. For example, some people may have gotten angry after watching the video, while others got sad or scared, and these different specific emotions might have different consequences.”
“Negative news exposure does not affect risk or ambiguity aversion” appeared in the June 2025 issue of Frontiers in Psychology after some resistance. Peer-reviewed journals can still be hesitant to publish null results, according to Dr. Lempert. She has a different opinion. “Null results challenge theories that many people just assume are true. I hope that more scientists will follow our example of publishing their null findings because that’s the only way that we’ll be able to build a full, nuanced picture of the relationship between emotion and decision-making.”
For Garcia Campos, now in his second year of doctoral work at Adelphi, the experience was a study in grit—a trait Dr. Lempert calls “key to success in research.” He refused to let the study go unfinished or unpublished just because the results were inconclusive. “I was so impressed by his perseverance that I strongly recommended him for our PhD program, and he was admitted,” she said.
Garcia Campos wants to impart the same lesson to his younger counterparts. “If any undergraduates are reading this,” he said, “don’t give up on your research. I got rejected twice before getting published.”
Frequently Asked Questions
According to research from Adelphi University, not in the way many people expect. In the study, participants who watched a negative news video about a car crash were no more averse to risk than participants who watched a neutral news video about a change in train schedules. The findings were published in Frontiers in Psychology in June 2025.
In psychology research, a risky decision is one where the odds of each outcome are known. An ambiguous decision is one where the odds are unknown. The Adelphi study measured whether negative news changed people’s willingness to make either kind of decision.
The researchers offer two possible explanations. First, participants may have known their bad feelings came from the video and so set those feelings aside when making decisions. Second, different negative emotions, such as anger, sadness or fear, may affect decisions in different ways, so their effects could cancel out when grouped together.
A null result means a study did not find the effect researchers expected. Journals are sometimes reluctant to publish these findings. Dr. Lempert argues that null results matter because they “challenge theories that many people just assume are true.” Publishing them helps scientists build a fuller picture of how emotion shapes decision-making.
The Emerging Scholars Program at Adelphi University lets undergraduate psychology majors conduct original research alongside a faculty mentor during their sophomore or junior year.