In response to the negativity of environmental mass media news stories, our experiment tested the effects of either a written positive or negative environmental news story had on mood of college students. As we hypothesized, participants who read the positive news story reported a more positive and less negative mood as evaluated by the PANAS scale. As we are being increasingly inundated by mass media, our findings have important implications on how environmental events affect the mood of the general population. Our study also suggests the importance of the news media to implement more positivity through their news stories.
