Identifying moments of peak audience engagement from brain responses during story listening

Schmälzle, Ralf; Wilcox, Shelby; Jahn, Nolan T.

doi:10.1080/03637751.2022.2032229

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 87 publications

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“…Action movies can stimulate intense bursts of arousal ( Hermans et al, 2011 ; Kautonen et al, 2018 ). Comedy tickles our funny bone ( Sawahata et al, 2013 ; Amir et al, 2015 ; Jääskeläinen et al, 2016 ; Schmälzle et al, 2022 ), drama/tragedy deals with human responses to suffering ( Raz et al, 2014 , 2016 ). And, while often hushed up, pornography is certainly quite powerful in stimulating experiences ( Prause et al, 2015 ; Schmälzle et al, 2017 ; Chen et al, 2020 ; Grubbs and Kraus, 2021 ).…”

Section: The Arrow Of Causality: From Media Content To Reception Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Still, given the desirability of movies and media as stimuli, we can expect that many others will follow: After all, movies often even galvanize culturally shared, long-lasting collective memories (e.g., the famous shower scene in Hitchcock’s Psycho), suggesting that these effects have a shared basis in the brains of people who saw the specific footage (see, e.g., Kauttonen et al, 2018 for a neuroimaging study of key-frames). The same logic can also be applied to study how movie content produces any kind of convergent audience response, from collective suspense and fear during a horror movie to collective laughter during comedy ( Schmälzle, 2022 ; Schmälzle et al, 2022 ).…”

Section: The Arrow Of Causality: From Media Content To Reception Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

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Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies

Schmälzle

Huskey

2023

Front. Neurosci.

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Every day, the world of media is at our fingertips, whether it is watching movies, listening to the radio, or browsing online media. On average, people spend over 8 h per day consuming messages from the mass media, amounting to a total lifetime dose of more than 20 years in which conceptual content stimulates our brains. Effects from this flood of information range from short-term attention bursts (e.g., by breaking news features or viral ‘memes’) to life-long memories (e.g., of one’s favorite childhood movie), and from micro-level impacts on an individual’s memory, attitudes, and behaviors to macro-level effects on nations or generations. The modern study of media’s influence on society dates back to the 1940s. This body of mass communication scholarship has largely asked, “what is media’s effect on the individual?” Around the time of the cognitive revolution, media psychologists began to ask, “what cognitive processes are involved in media processing?” More recently, neuroimaging researchers started using real-life media as stimuli to examine perception and cognition under more natural conditions. Such research asks: “what can media tell us about brain function?” With some exceptions, these bodies of scholarship often talk past each other. An integration offers new insights into the neurocognitive mechanisms through which media affect single individuals and entire audiences. However, this endeavor faces the same challenges as all interdisciplinary approaches: Researchers with different backgrounds have different levels of expertise, goals, and foci. For instance, neuroimaging researchers label media stimuli as “naturalistic” although they are in many ways rather artificial. Similarly, media experts are typically unfamiliar with the brain. Neither media creators nor neuroscientifically oriented researchers approach media effects from a social scientific perspective, which is the domain of yet another species. In this article, we provide an overview of approaches and traditions to studying media, and we review the emerging literature that aims to connect these streams. We introduce an organizing scheme that connects the causal paths from media content → brain responses → media effects and discuss network control theory as a promising framework to integrate media content, reception, and effects analyses.

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Section: The Arrow Of Causality: From Media Content To Reception Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: The Arrow Of Causality: From Media Content To Reception Resp...mentioning

confidence: 99%

Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies

Schmälzle

Huskey

2023

Front. Neurosci.

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Narrative transportation: How stories shape how we see ourselves and the world

Green,

Appel

2024

Advances in Experimental Social Psychology

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Collective Brain Alignment During Story Reception: Shared Neural Responses in French, Chinese, and English Listeners of Le Petit Prince, 小王子, or The Little Prince

Schmälzle,

Lim,

Jahn

et al. 2024

KSJCS

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Identifying moments of peak audience engagement from brain responses during story listening

Cited by 3 publications

References 87 publications

Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies

Integrating media content analysis, reception analysis, and media effects studies

Narrative transportation: How stories shape how we see ourselves and the world

Collective Brain Alignment During Story Reception: Shared Neural Responses in French, Chinese, and English Listeners of Le Petit Prince, 小王子, or The Little Prince

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