Seth Finn

Origins of Media Exposure Linking Personality Traits to TV, Radio, Print, and Film Use

This investigation of the five-factor model of personality as a correlate of mass media use was designed to validate key links in a basic model of the uses and gratifications paradigm. Survey data collected from 219 university students who kept diaries of time spent using the mass media and participating in nonmediated communication activities were submitted to canonical correlation analysis. Minutes devoted to TV viewing, radio listening, pleasure reading, and movie attendance were correlated with the five personality traits of the NEO-PI—neuroticism, extroversion, openness, agreeableness, and conscientiousness. The strongest relationships for mass media use were between openness and pleasure reading, extroversion and negative pleasure reading, and openness and negative TV viewing. Individuals who scored higher on extroversion and agreeableness exhibited a preference for nonmediated activities, especially conversation.

Social Isolation and Social Support as Correlates of Television Viewing Motivations

Data from three computer-administered panel studies at the University of North Carolina were analyzed to explore relationships between motivations for television viewing and six individual-differences measures, including shyness, loneliness, self-esteem, and three measures of social support. Viewing motivations were supposed to be related to needs arising from two distinct sources: (a) social compensation, which included companionship, pass time, habit, and escape motivations, and (b) mood management, which included relaxation, entertainment, arousal, and information motivations. The results based on a sample of 290 undergraduates revealed that self-esteem and the three other social-support variables correlated positively with the mood-management viewing motive and negatively with the social-compensation viewing motive. Also as hypothesized, shyness and loneliness correlated positively with the social-compensation viewing motive.

Television "Addiction?" An Evaluation of Four Competing Media-Use Models.

Employing a uses and gratifications paradigm, four individual differences — sensation seeking, religiosity, hostility and family cohesion — were examined simultaneously as correlates of drug use and television viewing and used to test four corresponding models of addiction: medical/disease, moral, compensatory and enlightenment. Not only were alcohol and marijuana use inversely correlated with time spent and motives for watching television, but sensation seeking, which was positively correlated with drug use was negatively correlated with television viewing. Conversely, religiosity was positively correlated with television viewing and negatively with drug use. With these results, the author concluded that the medical/disease model of television addiction lacked empirical support, and other models emphasizing personal control and responsibility appeared more appropriate for developing strategies to regulate excessive or compulsive television viewing.

SOURCE, DESTINATION, AND ENTROPY Reassessing the Role of Information Theory in Communication Research

Although Shannon and Weavers The Mathematical Theory of Communication has had a profound impact on the development of communication research, few scholars have adapted Shannons concepts to their research questions. The authors argue that the failure to recognize the difference between the two fundamental orientations in Shannons theory—the relationship between source and destination and the technical characteristics of transmission channels—has retarded the use of Shannons concepts, especially his measure of information. Taking care to differentiate between these two aspects of information theory, the authors review the small body of empirical research inspired by Shannons theory. They find that Shannons entropy measure is especially useful in the study of human systems because it permits researchers to analyze categorical data using quantitative statistical tools.

Impact of Arousing Commercials on Perceptions of TV News

b Researchers studying perception of television news have focused on cognitive recall and learning.1 By contrast, little attention has been paid to the interaction between news programming and the spot ads that regularly interrupt commercial television news programs. The operating assumption has been that adult viewers, unlike children,2 are entirely capable of distinguishing between commercial and program content. But while there is no reason to question this assumption at the

Measuring Effective Writing Cloze Procedure and Anaphoric “This”

In this study of expert use of anaphoric “this,” six history textbook passages written by composition instructors, text linguists, and professional editors are submitted to cloze procedure for comprehensive analysis. Discrepancies in the predictability of content and function words pinpoint examples of ineffective anaphoric expressions using “this” as a demonstrative pronoun (“unattended this”) or “this” as a demonstrative adjective introducing a noun phrase (“attended this”). The analysis indicates that (a) current stylistic guidelines proscribing unattended “this” are overstated and (b) attended “this” is best employed when synonyms for the antecedent and descriptive adjectives are used to provide the reader new information about the referent. The studys information theory perspective leads to the further generalization that effective written communication is often syntactically predictable and semantically not.