The effects of solutions versus ‘heart-warmer’ journalism on audience wellbeing, self-efficacy, and trust

Solutions journalism, rigorous reporting on responses to social problems, has separated itself from lighter and inspirational ‘heart-warming’ news. However, existing studies on outcomes such as positive emotion and wellbeing, efficacy, and trust in news primarily test solutions against problem-oriented reporting. Accordingly, we ran a between-participants repeated-measures experiment among young higher-education students in Australia (N = 262) and the United States (N = 249). Participants read three articles on relevant university-related topics in solutions-oriented or ‘heart-warming’ story conditions. Participants in the heart-warming condition reported higher eudaimonic (meaning-related) and hedonic (pleasure-related) wellbeing, though solutions stories were identified as more evidently addressing a structural issue. There was no difference across conditions in effects on community-efficacy, though self-efficacy increased among US participants in the solutions condition. Similarly, US participants in the solutions condition reported higher trust, however, the opposite effect was found in the Australian sample. Our results suggest participants do find a difference between solutions and heart-warming journalism. As positive emotion is currently the only consistent finding in the solutions journalism audience-effects literature, our study points to the importance of testing solutions journalism against heart-warming as well as negative/prototypical news, and considering more nuanced definitions of wellbeing than positive and negative emotion alone.