Journalism under the sun: How daylight shapes emotional expression in news

Abstract

This study investigates how daylight duration, as an embodied environmental factor, shapes emotional expression in news. Drawing on the affective epistemology of journalism, three sequential studies using large-scale, multi-source data identify heterogeneous daylight effects while excluding confounders. In regions with high annual daylight variance, longer daylight suppresses emotional expression; in low-variance regions, it amplifies. We explain this divergence through collective expectations: in high-variance regions, journalists’ perceptions align with stable seasonal rhythms, fostering emotional stability, whereas in low-variance regions, daylight deviations trigger arousal and emotional instability. Building on these findings, we propose that physical environmental factors should be conceptualized as one of the enabling conditions that interact with institutional and social structures in news production. By integrating environmental physiology with news production, the study extends theoretical and methodological boundaries of journalism research.