Constructing Deservingness: Media Frames, Immigrant Ethnicity and Public Emotion

Project Overview This study investigates how journalistic framing tone and immigrant identity cues interact to shape the emotional and moral judgments that members of the British public make toward migrants. Situated at the intersection of framing theory, affective neuroscience and media sociology, the project asks a deceptively simple question: does the stylistic register in which an immigrant's story is told, independent of the facts contained within it, determine whether that person is perceived as deserving of empathy, blame, or recognition? Background and Rationale In an era of intensifying populism and post-truth discourse, immigration has become one of the most emotionally loaded topics in British public life. Media outlets do not merely report on migrants; they construct moral categories through which audiences evaluate them. Tabloid-style journalism, characterised by sensationalist framing, moral contrast and othering rhetoric, has been shown to mobilise affect (fear, resentment, and blame) while broadsheet-style outlets tend to employ humanising narratives that foreground structural context and invite compassion. Yet the mechanisms by which these tonal differences translate into measurable shifts in reader emotion and moral judgment remain underspecified in the empirical literature. This study addresses that gap. Drawing on Barrett's (2017) theory of constructed emotion, in which affect is not a raw biological response but an interpretation of core somatic states shaped by cultural and linguistic context, we treat media frames as emotional infrastructure: systems that distribute empathy and blame unequally across social groups, reinforcing or disrupting hierarchies of recognition and moral worth. We further draw on Entman's (1993) framing theory, narrative empathy research, and the social psychology of deservingness to build a theoretically integrated experimental design capable of isolating the independent and interactive effects of tone, ethnicity, and gender on affective and attitudinal outcomes. Design and Methodology The study employs a 2 (framing tone: broadsheet vs. tabloid) × 2 (target ethnicity: Black/Nigerian vs. White/Polish) × 2 (target gender: male vs. female) between-subjects experimental design, yielding eight vignette conditions. Approximately 3,000 UK-resident adults will be recruited through Prolific using stratified quota sampling, with equal allocation across four demographic strata (Black male, Black female, White male, White female; n=750 per stratum) to ensure adequate statistical power for interaction analyses and to enable tests of objective similarity effects. Each participant is randomly assigned to a single vignette describing an immigrant seeking employment in the UK. Vignettes are matched on all factual content, narrative structure, biographical details, and described circumstances, and vary only in journalistic tone and protagonist identity cues (name, pronouns, and national origin). Broadsheet-style vignettes employ empathic, humanising language emphasising resilience, agency and social contribution. Tabloid-style vignettes employ critical or sensationalist framing, emphasising cost, dependency and moral failing. Outcome measures include self-reported empathy, blame attribution, and perceived agency, assessed via sliding scales following vignette exposure. Affective state is measured using valence and arousal scales administered both before and after vignette exposure, enabling calculation of within-person affect-shift (ΔValence, ΔArousal) as a manipulation check and potential mediator. Hypotheses The study tests eight pre-registered hypotheses. In brief, we predict that tabloid framing will yield lower empathy, higher blame and lower perceived agency than broadsheet framing (H1a); that Black targets will receive lower empathy and higher blame than White targets holding content constant (H1b); that male targets will receive lower empathy and higher blame than female targets (H2); that the Black-White gap in evaluations will be amplified under tabloid relative to broadsheet framing (H3); and that the male-female gap will similarly be moderated by tone (H4). We further predict that perceived agency will partially mediate the effect of framing on empathy and blame (H5); that tabloid framing will produce more negative affect shifts (H6); that affective shift will mediate framing effects on attitudinal outcomes including perceived deservingness and support for restrictive immigration policy (H7); and that objective demographic similarity between participant and target will independently predict more favourable evaluations (H8). Expected Outcomes and Contributions We anticipate findings will reveal a structured emotional hierarchy in which both media tone and identity cues combine to determine perceived deservingness, with the most negative evaluations concentrated in the tabloid-framed, Black male condition. The mediation analyses are expected to confirm that perceived agency is a critical pathway through which framing influences moral judgment, suggesting that humanising communication strategies which foreground intentional effort and structural constraint can buffer dehumanising effects even within hostile tonal environments. These findings will make several contributions. Theoretically, the study extends framing research beyond cognitive agenda-setting to the domain of situated affect, integrating Barrett's constructed emotion framework with Entman's framing paradigm in a single empirical design. Methodologically, the use of pre-post affect measurement as both a manipulation check and mediator offers a template for affect-sensitive experimental communication research. Practically, the findings will provide empirical grounding for reframing strategies in migration advocacy and public communication campaigns, identifying the specific tonal and narrative features that cultivate empathy rather than resentment. Although anchored in the UK media context, the mechanisms under investigation (racialised deservingness, populist emotional governance, and narrative humanisation) are globally resonant, and the design is scalable across national contexts. Project Status Data collection has not yet commenced. References Barrett, L.F. (2017) How emotions are made: The secret life of the brain. Pan Macmillan. Block, D. (2018) Post-truth and political discourse. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Entman, R.M. (1993) ‘Framing: Towards clarification of a fractured paradigm’, McQuail’s reader in mass communication theory, 390, p. 397.