Where the Mind Meets the Message: Reflections on Ten Years of Measuring Psychological Responses to Media

Abstract

In the last decade, most communication researchers coming from an effects tradition acknowledged that the answer to Lasswell's (1948) famous question--Who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effects?--would not be answerable without considering mental processes. In other words, understanding the situation, the message, the medium, and the sender of the message may still not provide sufficient knowledge and understanding to predict or explain individual responses to the message. In 1993, Seth Geiger and John Newhagen published an essay called Revealing the Black Box: Information Processing and Media Effects. It began with the following statement: Understanding how individuals process messages is central to any comprehensive theory of Communication. As self-evident as the statement may seem, the conceptualization and measurement of mass media effects have generally ignored message processing issues (Geiger & Newhagen, 1993, p. 42). This was one of many voices calling for an integration of cognitive psychology with the study of media effects. The essay concluded that: A comprehensive theory must necessarily include an explanation of the effects of messages on individuals.... The fact that conceptual and methodological tools to look inside the black box of the human mind are only just becoming widely available to communication researchers should not be a cause for despair or abandonment. (Geiger & Newhagen, 1993, p. 48) In the following year, the edited book, Measuring Psychological Responses to Media Messages, was published (Lang, 1994). It provided explanations of how specific psychological measures could be used to assess the mental processing of mediated messages. Now, one can ask how such research has fared in the last decade? Have mass communication researchers continued to try to understand how messages are processed? Or has the message-processing research withered? It is possible to get a preliminary answer to these questions simply by examining the trends in the published literature since 1994. Therefore, we examined the last ten years of published research in some of the mainstream empirical communication journals. This is not meant to be a formal bibliometric study or content analysis, but simply to provide a sense of how much of the published research was and is psychological in nature. To do this, all the articles in four major communication journals were examined from January 1993 through December 2002. The four journals were Journal of Communication (JOC), Communication Research (CR), Human Communication Research (HCR), and the Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media (JOBEM). The authors also examined three volumes (all issues) of a new, but highly relevant, journal, Media Psychology, published from 1999 through 2002. The bibliographic citations, keywords, and abstracts for all the articles from these journals were downloaded from an electronic data base into a bibliographic software program. Articles were defined as psychological in nature if they used any one of a set of the following methodological and theoretical keywords: cognit*, psycholog*, info* proc* memory, physio*, comprehension, emotion, affect, reac* time, RT, STRT, skin cond*, gsr, sc, electrodermal, HR, heart rate, cardiac, CRM, eyes on screen, thought list*, recall, recog*, arousal, and attention. Note that the asterisks next to the root descriptors indicates that any suffix form could be attached to the roots and the descriptors and the suffix would still be defined as psychological in nature. Because three of the journals, CR, HCR, and JOC, routinely publish research that does not deal with mediated communication, the matching citations from those journals were further searched for the following terms: televis*, radio, news, media, Internet, online, advert*, brand, commercial, movie, and film. Table 1 shows that in 1993 there were 25 articles published in the literature that contained at least one of the media terms and at least one of the psychological terms. …