Selective Exposure and Mood Management in Media

Selective Exposure

Dolf Zillmann provides a theoretical explanation of how people interact with the media. Persuasion in media has the power to convince people. Media has the power to change behavior, attitude, thinking, and emotions.

He wonders why entertainment is not being studied as an agent of mass media.

He points out two different areas: effects research/media effects, and audience research.

Theories are made on assumptions. Assumptions in social science disciplines are never tested. Soul, feelings, intelligence are nothing you can observe. Behaviorists study human behaviors. Around 1970, they understood that they should study not what media does to humans, but what humans do to media.

Communications is a result of sociology plus psychology. Sociology makes assumptions about society, and psychology makes assumptions about the individual.

If you look at behavior, you must look first to intentions. They have studied what people do with media, not what media does to people.

The basic assumption in the study of selective exposure is that people expose themselves to external stimuli in a selective way. This means that people choose certain types of media content and avoid other types. Therefore, the selective exposure concept emphasizes the active role of the individual in the selection of media content.

The selective exposure paradigm is that people are exposed to specific content and they select specific media to satisfy specific needs. People choose the media content; sometimes people follow routines.

It is assumed that human beings are hedonists in general; they arrange the world around them in a way they can feel themselves in a good state, minimizing negative thoughts. We decide to what we pay attention.

Mood Management

Dolf Zillmann studied in the US, Alabama, and then, he went to live in South Carolina. He is a central figure, the most productive researcher in entertainment research.

He works in the selective exposure field, and he is based on the premise that people are hedonists. People, in their seemingly continual efforts at improving affective and emotional experience, follow a hedonistic impulsion towards pleasure maximization. People act, feel, and do according to what they want.

He didn't ask people "why they do something", because he doubts that people are aware of their motivations; he puts them in a certain situation where they unconsciously make their choices.

Zillmann's Theory

People use media selection to improve their moods. He uses selective exposure methodology to evaluate the choice of exciting and unexciting programs as a function of noxious excitatory experience.

Experiment

The experimental setting consists in that he put the people in a certain condition, randomly put them in 2 groups and by that make the groups equal, manipulate them by getting them bored or excited and put them in the experiment. Zillmann placed respondents into a state of either boredom or stress, and then provided them with the opportunity to watch television. They manipulated them.

Result

• Bored people and exciting programs;
• Viewers in acute stress and unexciting programs.
• Viewers who sample entertaining programs seek to elude bad moods. They avoid material with affinities to their states.

A final extension of mood management theory refers to the concept of telic hedonism, and the distinction between processes that serve short-term vs. long-term hedonic goals.

Telic Hedonism

Refers to the acceptance of negative mood and unpleasant affective states in the interest of subsequent hedonic gratifications. This suggests that anticipatory considerations play an important role in mood management processes.