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Motivated cognition, resource allocation and resource availability during naked news

Posted on:2014-03-06Degree:Ph.DType:Dissertation
University:Indiana UniversityCandidate:Bae, SoyoungFull Text:PDF
GTID:1458390008462402Subject:Mass communication
Abstract/Summary:
This dissertation examined how people process news information with an increasingly sexy female anchor across different emotional news stories. Specifically, the goal of this study is to examine how the actual act of undressing, and the extent to which the newscaster is undressed, interferes with or aids in the encoding of audio and visual news information. LC4MP is useful to guide this study to answer its main questions. This theory provides an explanation as to how emotional content such as a sexual stimulus is processed based on motivated cognition. During viewing, cognitive resources are allocated, required, and available. A viewer allocates some number of resources and a message requires a certain number. The difference between the two is called available resources. Secondary task reaction times as an indicator of available resources and recognition as an indicator of message encoding were measured. This study first investigated whether men and women have different emotional responses to the sexy female anchor. Findings showed that gender differences exist in responding to undressing newscasters by indicating greater increases in men's arousal and pleasant feelings and in women's unpleasant feelings. Secondly, this study investigated the influence of the increasingly unclothed newscaster as a positive stimulus on news processing, at least for heterosexual men, assuming the newscaster is an increasingly positive stimulus. Results showed that men processed news better as the newscasters were more unclothed. Thirdly, it contributes to knowledge on how two continuous streams of emotional content are processed simultaneously. Naked News is optimal because it allows for testing a continuum of female sexiness and emotional news. This study found that emotionally congruent content (i.e., positive news stories with the positive newscaster) was encoded better than emotionally incongruent content (i.e., negative news with the positive newscaster). Fourthly, it contributes to understanding how adding structural features (the newscaster's action of undressing) with different sets of emotional content affect the encoding of information because little is known about how incongruent emotional content and structural features interact to affect information processing. Results showed that adding structural features is mostly beneficial for emotionally congruent content but not for incongruent content.
Keywords/Search Tags:News, Emotional, Content, Information, Structural features
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