This study took popular music from the Top 30 charts and, in a pretest, evaluated its energy and joyfulness as musical qualities. The findings were used to create sets of musical selections that were either low or high in these qualities. In the experiment proper, respondents were placed in states of bad, neutral, or good moods and then, in an ostensibly independent study, provided the opportunity to freely choose from the sets of musical selections. The selections were offered by computer software that recorded individual exposure times by selection. To ensure selectivity, exposure time was limited to about one third of the total running time of all available selections. Consistent with predictions from mood-management theory, respondents in bad moods elected to listen to highly energetic-joyful music for longer periods than did respondents in good moods. Respondents in bad moods, moreover, were more decisive in exercising their musical preferences. Following the listening period, respondents' moods did not appreciably differ across the experimental mood conditions.

The author has proposed and experimentally tested the mood adjustment approach, complementing mood management theory. Participants were placed in an initial mood and led to anticipate different activities after the waiting period. The upcoming activities were either dynamic or lengthy (arousal) and associated with either pleasure or performance (valence), resulting in a 2 x 2 design. During an ostensible waiting period, participants listened to choices of popular music at their will in a computer-aided procedure. This music taken from the Top 30 charts had been evaluated in a pretest for energy and joyfulness as musical qualities in order to create sets of musical selections that were either low or high in these qualities. In the experiment proper, selective exposure to energetic-joyful music as dependent measure was unobtrusively recorded via software. Results regarding self-exposure across time show that patterns of music listening differ with initial mood and anticipation, lending support to mood adjustment hypotheses. Mood management processes occurred in the beginning of the waiting period, whereas mood adjustment purposes set in toward the anticipated activity.Moods determine our outlook-how we look at the world, others, and ourselves. Although we often cannot change the world to our liking, we can influence our current affective perspective comparatively easily. In doing so, we take secondary control and manage our mood. Such coping behavior is very functional, given that anger and frustration due to unfavorable but unchangeable circumstances have been demonstrated to be unhealthy (e.g., Suinn, 2001). The aim of mood management widely consists of altering a disagreeable mood, enhancing a mediocre feeling state, or maintaining a pleasant mood. The media provide efficient stimuli to regulate one's mood, and access to this mood-regulating content is convenient and ubiquitous in modern civilization. Entertainment comprises a wide assortment of stimuli that are created to play on our emotions, which gives media consumers material to manage mood (Zillmann, 1988). Not surprisingly, we spend much of our leisure time with entertainment, from romance novels to video games. In fact, from a theoretical point of view conceptualized by Zillmann (1988), the motivation of self-exposure to media entertainment equals mood management Silvia Knobloch is on the faculty of the Department of Communication Studies, University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

No abstract

No abstract

An Internet newsmagazine was created, involving all features of online interactivity. The text of all available reports was held constant. The imagery of a subset of articles was manipulated, however. The manipulated articles were presented either without images, with text-related innocuous images, or with text-related threatening images in both their headline displays and their text bodies. During a fixed period of time, readers were free to sample articles and to read as much of them as they pleased. Unbeknownst to them, their selective exposure behavior was automatically recorded. It was observed that the incorporation of threatening images fostered more frequent selection of the associated articles and markedly increased reading times of the corresponding texts. The incorporation of innocuous images had similar but more moderate effects. Retrospective accounts of reading were consistent with the recorded exposure behavior.