The Effects of Edits on Arousal, Attention, and Memory for Television Messages: When an Edit Is an Edit Can an Edit Be Too Much?

Lang, Annie; Zhou, Shuhua; Schwartz, Nancy; Bolls, Paul D.; Potter, Robert F.

doi:10.1207/s15506878jobem4401_7

Cited by 159 publications

(131 citation statements)

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“…Specifically, we attempted to determine if musical clips, such as those used in radio or television advertisements, could be interpreted using a structural features conceptualization previously applied to radio and television messages. In this approach, the number of cuts within a video scene has provided enough environmental variance to elicit orienting responses and subsequent changes in physiological arousal (e.g., Lang et al, 1999;Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls, & Potter, 2000). Likewise, increasing the frequency of onset of structural features in radio advertisements has delivered similar effects (Potter & Callison, 1999;Potter et al, 2002;Potter & Choi, 2006).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Music on Physiological Arousal: Explorations into Tempo and Genre

2007

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Two experiments explore the validity of conceptualizing musical beats as auditory structural features and the potential for increases in tempo to lead to greater sympathetic arousal, measured using skin conductance. In the first experiment, fast-and slow-paced rock and classical music excerpts were compared to silence. As expected, skin conductance response (SCR) frequency was greater during music processing than during silence. Skin conductance level (SCL) data showed that fast-paced music elicits greater activation than slow-paced music. Genre significantly interacted with tempo in SCR frequency, with faster tempo increasing activation for classical music while decreasing it for rock music. A second experiment was conducted to explore the possibility that the presumed familiarity of the genre led to this interaction. Although further evidence was found for conceptualizing musical beat onsets as auditory structure, the familiarity explanation was not supported. Music Effects on Arousal -2 Effects of Music Genre and Tempo on Physiological ArousalMusic communicates many different types of messages through the combination of sound and lyric (Sellnow & Sellnow, 2001). For example, music can be used to exchange political information (e.g., Frith, 1981;Stewart, Smith, & Denton, 1989).Music can also establish and portray a self-or group-image (Arnett, 1991(Arnett, , 1992Dehyle, 1998;Kendall & Carterette, 1990;Dillman Carpentier, Knobloch & Zillmann, 2003;Manuel, 1991;McLeod, 1999; see also Hansen & Hansen, 2000). Pertinent to this investigation, music can communicate emotional information (e.g., Juslin & Sloboda, 2001). In short, music is a form of "interhuman communication in which humanly organized, non-verbal sound is perceived as vehiculating primarily affective (emotional) and/or gestural (corporeal) patterns of cognition" (Tagg, 2002, p. 5).This idea of music as communication reaches the likes of audio production students, who are taught the concept of musical underscoring, or adding music to "enhance information or emotional content" in a wide variety of ways from establishing a specific locale to intensifying action (Alten, 2005, p. 360). In this realm, music becomes a key instrument in augmenting or punctuating a given message. Given the importance of arousal and/or activation in most theories of persuasion and information processing, an understanding of how music can be harnessed to instill arousal is arguably of benefit to media producers looking to utilize every possible tool when creating messages, whether the messages are commercial appeals, promotional announcements or disease-prevention messages. It is with the motivation of harnessing the psychological response to music for practical application that two experiments were conducted to test whether message creators can rely on musical tempo as a way to increase sympathetic nervous system Music Effects on Arousal -3 activation in a manner similar to other structural features of media (i.e., cuts, edits, sound effects, voice changes). Before ex...

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Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Effects of Music on Physiological Arousal: Explorations into Tempo and Genre

2007

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“…3 The film's narrative structure was conventional, featuring a linear story told chronologically (Barsam 2007;Murphy 2007). Its pace can be termed "medium" (as operationalized by Lang, Bolls, Potter and Kawahara 1999;Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls and Potter 2000). Neither the gist of the story nor its visuals are either extremely easy or too difficult to understand and remember (as shown in the descriptive statistics in Perego et al 2015, where the same film had been used in experiments).…”

Section: Videomentioning

confidence: 99%

Is subtitling equally effective everywhere? A first cross-national study on the reception of interlingually subtitled messages

Perego¹,

Laskowska²,

Matamala³

et al. 2016

Across Languages and Cultures

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Recent research on the reception of interlingual subtitling revealed that it is cognitively effective: watching a subtitled film results in a good understanding of the film content, it does not require a significant tradeoff between image processing and text processing, and it leads to a good performance in the recognition of the words and expressions 4 contained in the subtitles. To date, the studies that revealed the effectiveness of subtitle processing have been conducted mono-nationally -e.g. d 'Ydewalle and De Bruycker (2007) in Belgium; Wissmath et al. (2009) in Switzerland;Perego et al. (2010Hinkin et al. (2014) in the US. However, it has not yet been demonstrated empirically whether subtitle effectiveness varies depending on the familiarity of viewers with subtitles. The crossnational study described in this paper aims to fill this gap and appraise the cognitive performance and overall appreciation of a moderately complex subtitled film by viewers with different degrees of familiarity with subtitles, i.e., viewers living in countries (Italy, Spain, Poland and Dutch-speaking Belgium) with different audiovisual translation traditions. The main findings reveal that subtitling is effective irrespective of users' familiarity with it, although it is not enjoyed equally among the tested populations.

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“…By definition, all cuts involve a change in the visual content of the cinematic image either through a change in subject, perspective, shot composition, camera location, elision of time or a combination of these factors. These sudden changes create a range of cognitive and physiological impacts on the viewer including slowed secondary task reaction time (Geiger & Reeves, 1993), focussing of attention (Reeves et al, 1985), increased eye movements (d 'Ydewalle, Desmet, & Van Rensbergen, 1998;Hochberg & Brooks, 1978;Smith & Henderson, 2008), improved recognition memory (Frith & Robson, 1975;Lang, 1991) and faster recognition for information presented after a cut (Carroll & Bever, 1976) as well as heart rate deceleration (Lang, 1990) and an increase in self-reported arousal (Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls, & Potter, 2000). As the degree of change increases so does viewer awareness of the cut (Smith & Henderson, 2008) and the cognitive load experienced by the viewer (Lang, Kurita, Gao, & Rubenking, 2013).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%