COMM 1100 Lecture Notes - Lecture 33: Cortisol, Mortality Salience, Slasher Film

• School: Ohio State University
• Department: Communication
• Course: COMM 1100
• Professor: Simon Lavis

Document Summary

Mood management- aligns most closely with uses and gratifications, and to cognitive dissonance theories. Uses and gratifications had 4 key assumptions: people use media for their own particular purposes, people seek to gratify needs, the media competes for our time and attention, people can accurately report media use/motivations. Cognitive dissonance is a psychological reaction (discomfort) when beliefs or actions are incompatible. Mood management posits that when consuming messages, we are motivated y pleasure and against pain. People choose what they watch without consideration: this is a subconscious element, this diverges uses and gratification. These choices are intended to regulate excitation: excitation: the action/state of exciting/being. We tend to choose content which opposes our current mood. We tend to choose content which exceeds our current mood. When negative, we seek a distinct mood with no overlap. Comedy programming is generally found to be a poor choice: particularly ones featuring hostile forms of humor.