mass-communication-theory

272 Section 4 Contemporary Mass Communication Theory
that were bothering you? Was the content unrelated to your personal problems and
therefore able to direct your thoughts toward something that made you feel better?
Was the content capable of inducing positive feelings—of making you feel good?
Can you remember an instance when you went to a movie and expected to be
entertained but the opposite happened? What went wrong? Was the movie boring?
Did it fail to distract you from your problems, or worse, did it actually remind you
of the problems? Did it fail to arouse positive feelings?
Mood management theory can help to explain why our efforts to manage our
moods can fail or why media content can be entertaining even when it concerns
seemingly unpleasant things—like chainsaw massacres or devastating earthquakes.
We might assume that situation comedies should always make us feel better, but
they could remind us of our problems or they might just be boring. Conversely,
we might expect that a horror movie or a thriller will arouse bad feelings, but it
could be quite diverting and exciting—it could have high excitation and absorption
potential.
Mood management theorists argue that we don’t have to be consciously aware
of these content attributes. We don’t need to use them to consciously select content.
Instead, we can be guided by our feelings about content—our vague expectations
about what will make us feel better as opposed to having a well-thought-out, rational
strategy guiding our selection. We don’t ponder the hedonic valance or the
semantic affinity of the television shows we select. According to Knobloch-
Westerwick, “Awareness of mood optimization needs does not have to be assumed
[by the researcher] … mood management processes may go by-and-large unnoticed
by those who act on them—at least very little cognitive elaboration usually takes
place” (2006, p. 241).
This view of audience members can be contrasted with that of uses-andgratifications
theorists, who rely on audience members to report both uses and
gratifications. Mood management theorists don’t expect audience members to be
able to report how they use content to manage moods. They don’t ask people to
fill out questionnaires rating the expected hedonic valence or the excitation potential
of various types of entertainment content. They know people don’t consciously
make these types of assessments about content.
Since they can’t conduct surveys to study mood moderation, they base their
conclusions primarily on findings produced by experiments. In these experiments,
audience members are exposed to media content that mood management theory
predicts should influence them in certain ways. Subjects are exposed to content
with high or low excitation potential or semantic affinity. But these experiments
can be difficult to design. Researchers need to develop stimulus materials containing
the proper amount of the attributes they are manipulating. But how do you
take people’s moods into account? Research ethics would make it difficult to
deliberately induce bad moods prior to exposure to content.
Some audience members (maybe you) would reject the mood management
explanation of what audience members are doing when they seek out entertainment
content. You might argue that you’re choosing content that is aesthetically pleasing
or just mindless entertainment. Altering your mood may be the furthest thing from
your mind. But is it? Might you be more concerned about managing your
Copyright 2010 Cengage Learning. All Rights Reserved. May not be copied, scanned, or duplicated, in whole or in part. Due to electronic rights, some third party content may be suppressed from the eBook and/or eChapter(s).
Editorial review has deemed that any suppressed content does not materially affect the overall learning experience. Cengage Learning reserves the right to remove additional content at any time if subsequent rights restrictions require it.