Sungkyoung Lee

Psychophysiological and Memory Effects of Negative Political ADS: Aversive, Arousing, and Well Remembered

This study examines whether negative political advertisements elicit automatic activation in the aversive motivational system among viewers. A measure is introduced—the eyeblink startle reflex—that provides evidence that negative ads do activate the aversive motivational system. As these participants watched negative political ads, physiological responses indicated that their body was reflexively preparing to move away. Negative ads also elicited more physiological and self-reported arousal than moderate ads. Recognition data show that detailed information from negative ads is better recognized; however, participants were also more likely to incorrectly report that they recognized information from negative ads they did not see.

Smoking Cues, Argument Strength, and Perceived Effectiveness of Antismoking PSAs

INTRODUCTION The study examines the effectiveness of antismoking public service announcements (PSAs) among adult smokers as a function of smoking cues and the argument strength of the PSAs. Consistent with the previous cue-reactivity studies, smoking cues are defined as one of the following visual scenes: (a) objects associated with smoking, (b) holding or handling cigarettes, and (c) actual smoking behaviors. Argument strength indicates smokers judgments of perceived strength and persuasiveness of the arguments extracted from the PSAs. METHODS Data were collected through a web-based experiment of a random sample of general population of smokers (n = 566 adults aged 19 years or older). Each participant was shown 4 PSAs randomly selected from a set of 60. Data were analyzed using multilevel modeling to assess the effects of smoking cues and argument strength. Effectiveness measures include perceived persuasiveness, transportation, valenced thought, negative emotion, and smoking-related thoughts. RESULTS Argument strength is a significant predictor of outcome variables. Although there were no significant main effects of smoking cues on any outcome variables, smoking cues were found to interact with argument strength such that the association between argument strength and outcome variables became weaker for PSAs in the smoking cue condition compared with those in the no-cue condition. CONCLUSIONS The interaction between smoking cues and argument strength suggests that smoking cues in antismoking PSAs undermine a significant part of what makes PSAs effective-their arguments against smoking. In designing antismoking messages, the inclusion of smoking cues should be weighed carefully.

Redefining Media Content and Structure in Terms of Available Resources: Toward a Dynamic Human-Centric Theory of Communication

This study reconceptualizes redundancy, complexity, and emotion in terms of cognitive load (specifically as resources allocated and required), then measures the combined real-time impact of these variables on available resources and encoding over the course of an hour television news program. Operational definitions of redundancy in the literature were ordered by their theoretically predicted level of resources required, then coded overtime. Dynamic measures of audio and video complexity in terms of resources allocated and required were developed and tested. Over the course of the news program, all combinations of independent variables occurred and the theoretically derived combinations of cognitive load successfully predicted changes in resources available as measured by Secondary Task Reaction Times (STRTs) and encoding indexed by recognition. The results suggest that defining message variables in terms of dynamic changes in cognitive load can allow us to predict the simultaneous dynamic impact of multiple message variables which contribute to complexity on processing capacity and message processing.

Correlating a Motivation-Activation Measure With Media Preference

This study investigates the relationship between individual differences in motivational system responsiveness and preferences for media genres and programming types. The Motivation Activation Measure (MAM) indexed the trait appetitive and aversive motivation system activation of 206 college-aged participants who subsequently responded to self-report scales designed to measure likelihood to use specific genres of television programming, radio formats, and video games. Predictions were made for the correlation between genre preferences and MAM scores based on a dual-activation model of motivational systems. Results suggest that initial media-selection behaviors may be predicted by conceptualizing genres according to their appeal from motivationally based attributes.

Constructing Recommendation Systems for Effective Health Messages Using Content, Collaborative, and Hybrid Algorithms

Theoretical and empirical approaches to the design of effective messages to increase healthy and reduce risky behavior have shown only incremental progress. This article explores approaches to the development of a “recommendation system” for archives of public health messages. Recommendation systems are algorithms operating on dense data involving both individual preferences and objective message features. Their goal is to predict ratings for items (i.e., messages) not previously seen by the user on content similarity, prior preference patterns, or their combination. Standard approaches to message testing and research, while making progress, suffer from very slow accumulation of knowledge. This article seeks to leapfrog conventional models of message research, taking advantage of modeling developments in recommendation systems from the commercial arena. After sketching key components in developing recommendation algorithms, this article concludes with reflections on the implications of these approaches in both theory development and application.

How Realistic Should Avatars Be? An Initial fMRI Investigation of Activation of the Face Perception Network by Real and Animated Faces

Abstract. Increased interaction with characters in games and online necessitates a better understanding of how different characteristics of these agents impact media users. This paper investigates a possible neurological underpinning for a common research finding – namely, that animated characters designed to be comparatively more human, more real, and more similar to the people they represent elicit more positive self-reported evaluations. The goal of this study was to examine the extent to which these results might be due to differential processing of character features in brain networks recruited for face recognition. There is some evidence that parts of the face network may be specifically tuned for real human faces. An experiment was conducted where participants viewed photographs of faces of actual agents (humans and animals) or colored drawings of matched agents (cartoon humans and animals). Using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure blood oxygen-level dependent (BOLD) activation...

Individual Differences in Trait Motivational Reactivity Influence Children and Adolescents’ Responses to Pictures of Taboo Products

This study examined how children and adolescents respond to pictures of products whose use, for them, is socially or legally restricted (e.g., beer, liquor, cigarettes). It was theorized and found that these pictures, referred to as taboo, elicit an automatic motivational activation whose direction and intensity are influenced by age and individual differences in defensive system activation. Results show that 11–12-year-old children demonstrate primarily aversive responses to taboo products, 13–15-year-old children have less aversive responses, and 16–17-year-old children have mixed appetitive and aversive motivational responses. Further, those with high defensive system activation show larger aversive and smaller appetitive responses across the age groups. These results suggest that placing pictures of these products in prevention messages may work for the prevention goal of reduced experimentation and risk in younger children but against the prevention goal for the older children who may be more likely to be exposed to opportunities for experimentation and use.

The Impact of Emotional Words on Listeners’ Emotional and Cognitive Responses in the Context of Advertisements:

The study examined how individual words occurring in mediated messages affect listeners’ emotional and cognitive responses. Scripts from actual radio advertisements were altered by replacing original words with target words that varied in valence—either positive, negative, or neutral. The scripts were then reproduced by nonprofessional speakers. Real-time processing of the target words was examined through the use of psychophysiological measures of dynamic emotional and cognitive responses collected from subjects (n = 55) and time-locked to the stimuli. Recognition memory provided a measure of encoding efficiency. As predicted, listeners had greater frown muscle responses following the onset of negatively valenced words compared with positively valenced words. Results also showed that positively valenced words elicited orienting responses in listeners but negatively valenced words did not. Recognition data show that positively valenced words were encoded better than neutrally valenced words, followed by negatively valenced words, which was consistent with the finding for the impact of emotional words on orienting responses.