Università degli Studi di Milano, Italy.
Public Underst Sci. 2017 Jul;26(5):547-563. doi: 10.1177/0963662516638634. Epub 2016 Apr 1.
Several studies provide evidence of the role of written communication in influencing public perception towards genetically modified organisms, whereas visual communication has been sparsely investigated. This article aims to evaluate the exposure of the Italian population to scary genetically modified organism-related images. A set of 517 images collected through Google are classified considering fearful attributes, and an index that accounts for the scary impact of these images is built. Then, through an ordinary least-squares regression, we estimate the relationship between the Scary Impact Index and a set of variables that describes the context in which the images appear. The results reveal that the first (and most viewed) Google result images contain the most frightful contents. In addition, the agri-food sector in Italy is strongly oriented towards offering a negative representation of genetically modified organisms. Exposure to scary images could be a factor that affects the negative perception of genetically modified organisms in Italy.
几项研究提供了书面交流在影响公众对转基因生物的看法方面的作用的证据，而视觉交流则很少被研究。本文旨在评估意大利人口对与转基因生物相关的可怕图像的接触情况。通过谷歌收集了一组 517 张图像，根据可怕属性进行了分类，并构建了一个考虑这些图像可怕影响的指数。然后，通过普通最小二乘法回归，我们估计了可怕影响指数与一组描述图像出现背景的变量之间的关系。结果表明，第一个（也是最常被查看的）谷歌搜索结果图像包含最可怕的内容。此外，意大利的农业食品部门强烈倾向于对转基因生物进行负面描述。接触可怕的图像可能是影响意大利人对转基因生物负面看法的一个因素。
