Boring is bad: Effects of emotional content and multitasking on enjoyment and memory

Abstract

Television has recently been described as being in a “peak TV” stage, with hundreds of engrossing, emotional narratives to choose from. Meanwhile, multitasking while viewing television is also at a peak stage. The present study examined enjoyment and signal detection memory outcomes in single-task and multitasking experimental conditions, where the primary task was watching positive, negative, and neutral television content, and the dual task condition permitted participants to go online on a second screen. Results demonstrate that multitasking viewing situations had negative effects on enjoyment and memory for non-emotional messages, but largely no effect when the primary task was viewing emotional messages. Specifically, multitasking was related to less enjoyment of neutral messages, lower recognition memory performance and sensitivity, and a more conservative criterion bias. The necessity of including the emotional content of messages as a variable when exploring memory and enjoyment in media multitasking situations is discussed.