Psychophysiological Measurement and Meaning

Cognitive and Emotional Processing of Media

Robert F. Potter, Paul Bolls

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN:
  9780805862867
• eBook ISBN:
  9781136589102
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Communication Studies
• Index: Psychology

This research volume serves as a comprehensive resource for psychophysiological research on media responses. It addresses the theoretical underpinnings, methodological techniques, and most recent research in this area. It goes beyond current volumes by placing the research techniques within a context of communication processes and effects as a field, and demonstrating how the real-time measurement of physiological responses enhances and complements more traditional measures of psychological effects from media.

This volume introduces readers to the theoretical assumptions of psychophysiology as well as the operational details of collecting psychophysiological data. In addition to discussing specific measures, it includes brief reviews of recent experiments that have used psychophysiological measures to study how the brain processes media. It will serve as a valuable reference for media researchers utilizing these methodologies, or for other researchers needing to understand the theories, history, and methods of psychophysiological research.

1

Psychophysiology in the Context of Media Processes and Effects Research

The general task of a social scientist is to ask questions about how human beings act within a complex world. For most of you reading this book your specific interests focus on how human beings interact with mediated messages— communications coming from television sets, computer monitors, mobile media devices, radios, game consoles, and the like. Social scientists explore these interactions in a variety of ways. Some take a fine-grained and systematic look at what is contained in the content of media messages using a method called content analysis. Others conduct surveys, using a wide range of instruments (phone interviews, mail surveys, website questionnaires) to assess people’s attitudes toward media-related issues. Most of this book, however, will focus on a third common technique used by social scientists: the laboratory experiment. If you have taken even the most basic high school science class you are somewhat familiar with the steps of experimental research. In a controlled environment a small number of variables are isolated and precisely varied in order to measure the effects of the manipulations on outcome variables of interest. There are fine books available to guide you in the general practice of experimental design (Babbie, 2010; Kirk, 1994). The overarching goal of this book is to show how psychophysiological measures—indices of bodily responses reflecting variation in psychological states—are used in experiments conducted by researchers interested in discovering how the brain processes mediated messages. By the time you are finished you will have a working understanding of what psychophysiological indices validly measure and be able to read the ever-increasing body of work being published in the area, some of which will be reviewed throughout this book.

But in order to understand how psychophysiological research methods are used in the modern media psychology lab, it’s helpful to first take a general look at the history of social scientific research in media processes and effects. As you’ll see, the measurement of bodily responses to media messages makes two brief appearances in the early part of that history, quickly retreating each time. The first appearance is actually only a single study, a module of the iconic Payne Fund Studies. Following that, the application of physiological measures disappears from media research for almost three decades due to the rapid and almost complete swing of the psychological discipline toward the behaviorist approach. The second appearance of research that included the observation of physiological responses to media occurs late within that behaviorist tradition, but even then only generates a handful of published studies before again being abandoned. With the luxury of hindsight, this seems to be primarily a result of prevailing, but mistaken, thoughts at that time concerning how different human physiological systems respond to arousing situations. The belief that all physiological indices should increase in response to arousing situations resulted in unpredicted and—at least at the time—inexplicable results. Once again, physiological measures virtually disappear from the media psychology researcher’s toolkit for several decades.

Not until media researchers fully embraced the theoretical underpinnings of psychophysiology—as opposed to just viewing physiological responses as more and different media effects one could measure—were they able to successfully utilize indices like heart rate, skin conductance and brain wave patterns as indicators of psychological states that vary in meaningful ways during the processing of mediated messages.

A brief History of Media Effects Research

Early Research—The Impact of Film Content

With the development and widespread distribution of each medium comes public concern over the effects of exposure to its content. Of particular focus is the impact of seemingly salacious materials on children. With electronic media, this reaction was first seen in the early 1920s as the number of movie theaters in cities and towns across the country rapidly increased. Interested in the impact of the new phenomenon, individual researchers from sociology and psychology conducted meticulous studies primarily focusing on the effects of movie houses on specific municipalities. Reverend J. J. Phelan, for example, published Motion pictures as a phase of commercial amusement in Toledo Ohio in 1919, claiming to “gather all available data and allow the reader to make his own interpretation” (p. 11) concerning the impact of film on society. The conclusions drawn in publications like this, however, did not derive from experimentation or careful observation. Instead they seem to have sprung from common understanding of the day concerning human cognition; namely that psychological mechanisms of thought, knowledge, attitude formation, and behavior were uniform across individuals (Sparks, 2002). As a result, Phelan and others crusading for governmental censorship of the motion picture industry believed that film content had very powerful effects. Under this powerful-effects view, it was, to use Phelan’s own imagistic language, as if the attitudes, knowledge, and beliefs contained in a motion picture were applied directly to the psyches of each audience member like they were being poured into the brain by a ladle!

This powerful-effects view resulted in Phelan giving a list of “specific dangers” to children who frequented movie theaters. Things like: an incapacity of sustained studying of school materials, the awaking of morbid curiosity, the development of an abnormal imagination, and even “false delineation of what constitutes true Americanism” (p. 112) all awaited any child who watched too many movies.

Although the research done during this time has largely been associated with a Hypodermic Needle Theory of media effects, an examination of individual works show more caution and reticence among researchers of the time (Wartella & Reeves, 1985). For example, although William Healy, a prominent scholar in the field of juvenile delinquency, warned that movies—and perhaps even more so, the darkness of the movie theaters themselves—led to increased sexual activity among youth, he also believed that the susceptibility to such effects was highly variable across individuals (Jowett, Jarvie, & Fuller, 1996).

In the early 1930s came the publication of a series of eight volumes under the title “Motion pictures and youth.” Today, students of media history are more familiar with them as The Payne Fund Studies, an interesting fact given that members of the private, philanthropic Payne Fund eventually attempted to distance the use of the fund’s name from the publications (Jowett et al., 1996). The reason for their lack of enthusiasm was the fervent political nature of the project’s leader Reverend William Harrison Short. Short’s intention was to use a series of social scientific research studies to gather enough damning evidence of the effects of motion pictures on youth that demands of governmental censorship would take hold. He believed that the best way to gather this evidence was by enlisting the leading researchers across several fields to design experiments using the highest standards of scientific rigor. In the end, it was likely the scientists’ objectivity and precision—which they placed above their own possible personal disdain for movie content—that ultimately led to results which made it hard to suggest strong, uniform effects resulted from movie exposure (Jowett et al., 1996).

Given the focus of this book, it is interesting that one of the 11 Payne Fund Studies relied heavily on the measurement of physiological reactions to movie content. Wendell S. Dysinger, a graduate student at Iowa State University, and his professor Christian A. Ruckmick were two members of the Payne Fund Study team whose goal was to “discover the emotional effects produced by various types of incidents in motion pictures on children and adults” (Dysinger & Ruckmick, 1933, p. 3). They did so by designing a series of laboratory and field studies where subjects between the ages of six and 50 watched popular films while dipping two fingers into a box about the size of a small loaf of bread. The box contained liquid electrode allowing skin resistance readings to be taken off their fingers. Pulse rate data were also recorded using a leather arm strap. Even by today’s standards, the extent of the Dysinger and Ruckmick data collection task is impressive. Not only did they record physiological data from 89 people across six age categories in the controlled environment of their research labs, but they negotiated to bring their equipment into the back three rows of local movie theaters, allowing them to collect additional data from 61 subjects in a more naturalistic setting.

In contrast to the declarations made by the likes of Phelan, the results of Dysinger and Ruckmick did not show uniform emotional reactions to film. Instead there were interesting variations across the different age categories. For example, skin resistance reactions to scenes from the “erotic” movie The Feast of Ishtar showed more arousal among the 16-year-old subjects than any other age group. Now remember, this was in the 1930s when erotic scenes consisted of kissing and groping that would likely be considered mild by today’s standards. But still, Dysinger and Ruckmick found fewer reactions to them in the older movie viewers compared to 16-year-olds. Furthermore, even within the 16-year-old age group there were substantial differences; some responded with very high levels of skin resistance and some had barely any resistance at all indicative of large arousal reactions. This led to the conclusion that the impact of film “is a matter of individual mental lives and must be regulated or at least judged according to the individual psychophysiological organism … of his peculiar mental and physical constitution” (Dysinger & Ruckmick, 1933, p. 115).

Behaviorism’s Strong Influence

As we will see later in this chapter, Dysinger & Ruckmick interpreted their results in accord with several of the theoretical precepts of modern psychophysiology, recognizing the importance of both external and internal contexts in being able to predict how individuals will react to a media message. However, this contextual way of thinking was overshadowed in the 1930s by the growing momentum of a major scientific paradigm: behaviorism and classical conditioning. In the early 1920s, Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov demonstrated how organisms could be conditioned to expect certain outcomes following a signal input (Samoilov, 2007). He did this first by repeatedly giving dogs food following a standard signal— such as a ticking metronome or the ringing of an electronic buzzer—and then measuring the activity in their salivary glands in response to the food presentation (Pavlov, 1927). After multiple conditioning trials, the dogs began to associate the signal with the onset of good things to eat. Eventually Pavlov’s data showed the dogs beginning to salivate in response to the signal alone, whether food was given or not. This pairing of a stimulus (the buzzer) with an identifiable response (increased saliva in the dogs’ mouths) became a guiding metaphor for much of the work done in psychology for the next several decades—an approach known generally as behaviorism.

One of the most famous and influential scientists associated with behaviorism— B. F. Skinner—believed that the only things necessary for explaining the behavior of any organism—including humans—was a description of the important elements of the external environment and an understanding of the functional connections between them and the behavior of interest (Smith, 1996). According to Skinner and other strict behaviorists, it was not only unnecessary but also somewhat foolish to develop theories about what was going on inside the brain of the animal since we could not possibly measure with any accuracy something that we could not directly observe (Smith, 1996). So, to return to the Pavlovian metaphor, the task of most experimental psychology conducted from the 1930s to 1950s became essentially one of matching an external stimulus to observable responses.

Communication researchers and theorists during this time reflected behaviorist approaches in their work, primarily because many scholars migrating to the field had been trained—and therefore highly influenced by—psychologists immersed in the paradigm (Paisley, 1984). The pattern of the Stimulus-Response Model, for example, is apparent in the classic definition of communication from Lasswell (1927/1971): “Who says What to Whom and with What Effect.” Later, the model proposed in Shannon and Weaver’s (1949) Mathematical theory of communications (see Figure 1.1) still conceptualized communicative acts in a manner just slightly more elaborated than Pavlov’s description of salivating dogs responding to signals 20 years previously.

Figure 1.1 The Shannon-Weaver model of communications, circa 1949.

Early Behaviorist Communication Research

Of course, with communication research in its infancy, using a behaviorist model to establish predictable responses from well-explicated causal stimuli was important and necessary work. Many notable relationships were identified during the early years of the field. Consider the research conducted by Hadley Cantril who explored the massive panic caused by the radio performance of H. G. Wells’ War of the Worlds on CBS’s “Mercury Theater of the Air.” The broadcast, which occurred on October 30, 1938, contained multiple on-air reminders that the show was merely a dramatic performance. Nevertheless, all over North America people believed they were hearing a live broadcast of an interplanetary invasion by Martians intent on destroying the Earth! The extent of the panic was so great that Cantril and his colleagues at Princeton University’s Office of Radio Research seized upon the opportunity to conduct the first investigation of wide scale public behaviors triggered by a media event (Lowery & DeFleur, 1995). What Cantril hoped to do was take the behavioral responses—which ranged from sorority sisters huddled around radios saying their tearful goodbyes to frantic calls to police stations and attempted suicides—and work backwards to identify the environmental conditions which had served as stimuli. To do so, the researchers conducted a wide-ranging study utilizing personal interviews, surveys, and content analysis of over 12,000 print pieces describing the broadcast and people’s reactions to it.

According to Lowery & DeFleur (1995), the researchers from the Office of Radio Research identified four different categories of responses to the radio play:

1. Those who listened to the War of the Worlds but decided the reports sounded too much like science fiction storytelling and therefore did not panic.
2. Those who compared what they were hearing in the broadcast to external information, such as a published radio schedule, determined the reports were fictional and did not panic.
3. People who obtained other external information but yet still panicked because they believed the broadcast was true.
4. Those who panicked from the onset of the broadcast and therefore were uninterested in checking what they heard against internal or external searches of further information.

Even though Cantril (1940) believed strict behaviorists would not be comfortable with his conclusions due to the absence of a repetitive conditioning element (but after all, how many times does an alien invasion of the planet repeat itself!), the influence of a behaviorist approach in these categories is hard to dispute. They provide descriptions of the external or environmental conditions on that October night and explain how they may have influenced a person to act in one of these four ways. These descriptions were either of key elements of the media messages (i.e., the dramatic excellence of the performance itself, the interruption of music programming to present “news” updates about the invasion, etc.), or the societal temperament in general (i.e., the fact that the broadcast occurred so close to Halloween, that war being salient in the minds of many listeners as Hitler’s fascist regime gained control in Germany, etc.). However, Cantril did not attempt to describe the processes that took place within the individual’s cognitive system to arrive at the conclusions they did and exhibit particular behaviors as a consequence.

Another behaviorist researcher, Carl Hovland, advanced the field with a prolific research career spent establishing links between external message attributes and opinion change in message recipients (Hovland, 1957; Hovland, Janis, & Kelly, 1953). Hovland’s research interests were greatly influenced by his stint in the US Army during World War II conducting experiments on how film could be used to affect audience opinion change (Lowery & DeFleur, 1995). During the two decades following the war, however, he moved from film to audiotape recordings of individuals making interpersonal arguments. In all he conducted over 50 studies as the director of the Yale Program of Research on Communication and Attitude Change. In his book Persuasion and communication (Hovland et al., 1953), for example, one chapter details experiments about the organization of message arguments and the ways in which varying their structure impacted opinion change. Research questions included:

• Should a persuasive message draw an explicit conclusion or should it leave the conclusion implicit and allow the audience to reach it?
• For a message to be maximally persuasive should each side of an argument be presented or only the points in favor of the position being argued for?
• If multiple points are made in an argument, should the message lead with the strongest one or save it for last?

To test these and other questions, Hovland recorded different versions of arguments on issues ranging from international politics to the benefits of higher education. He even included more mundane topics like the usefulness of woodworking as a hobby! In tightly controlled experimental conditions, college students listened to their assigned audiotape and then gave their opinions and attitudes toward the topic. Hovland and his colleagues felt that three things happen when someone changes an opinion:

1. A recommended opinion (the stimulus) is presented.
2. Assuming that the subjects have paid attention to and understood the message, the audience responds or reacts. That is, they think about their initial opinions and also about the recommended opinion.
3. The subjects will change their attitudes if incentives (rewards) for making a new response are greater that (sic) those for making the old response (Lowery & DeFleur, 1995, pp. 169–170).

Once again, there was not much wor...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Psychophysiology in the Context of Media Processes and Effects Research
• 2. Psychophysiology: Theoretical Assumptions and a History of the Field
• 3. Key Terms and Concepts in Psychophysiology
• 4. Psychophysiological Measures of Cognitive Processing of Media
• 5. Psychophysiological Measures of Emotional Processing of Media
• 6. Emerging Psychophysiological Measures for Media Research
• 7. Connecting Psychophysiology to Other Measures of Mediated Message Processing
• 8. On Your Own: Setting up a Media Psychophysiology Lab and Conducting Experiments
• 9. Psychophysiological Measures and Meaning: Implications of Current Research and a Peek at the Future
• Glossary
• Bibliography
• Index