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Study Guide #2: Chapters 1-11, 18-20 (except 5)

Chapter 1: How the News Shapes our Civic Agenda1. The Acapulco Typology: A four part typology that explores agenda-setting effects with two dichotomous dimensions;

1. the first dimension distinguishes between two ways of looking at agendas. The focus of attention can be on the entire set of items that define the agenda, or it can be narrowed to a single, particular item on the agenda.

2. the second dimension distinguishes between two ways of measuring the salience of items on the agenda, either aggregate measures describing an entire population or measures that describe individual responses.

3. There are four perspectives that comprise the Acapulco Typologya. Perspective I: includes the entire agenda and uses aggregate measures of the population to establish the salience of

items. It is named “competition” because it examines an array of issues competing for positions on the agenda.b. Perspective II: shifts the focus to the agenda of each individual; labeled ‘automation’ because of its unflattering view

of human behavior. c. Perspective III: narrows the focus to a single item on the agenda but uses aggregate measures to establish salience;

named ‘natural history’ because the focus typically is on the degree of correspondence between the media agenda and the public agenda in the rise and fall of a single item over time.

d. Perspective IV: focuses on the individual, but narrows its observations to the salience of a single agenda item; named ‘cognitive portrait’ because it measures the salience of a single issue for an individual before/after exposure to news programs.

2. Attributes: Each of the objects on an agenda has numerous attributes—characteristics and properties that describe the object. Both the selection of objects for attention and the selection of attributes for picturing those objects are powerful agenda-setting roles. An important part of the news agenda is the attributes that journalists and members of the public have in mind when they think about and talk about each object. Attributes have two dimensions: a cognitive component regarding information about substantive characteristics that describe the object and an affective component regarding the positive/negative/neutral tone of these characteristics on the media/public agenda. The influence of attribute agendas in the news on the public’s attribute agenda is the second level of agenda setting.

3. Need for orientation: The concept of need for orientation provides a richer psychological explanation for variability in agenda-setting effects because it goes beyond qualifying issues on an unobtrusive/obtrusive continuum. The need for orientation suggests that there are individual differences in the need for orienting cues to an issue and in the need for background information about an issue. An individuals’ need for orientation has been defined in terms of relevance and uncertainty. The greater a person’s need for orientation, the more likely he/she will attend to the mass media agenda, and the more likely he/she is to reflect the salience of the objects and attributes on the media agenda.

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Chapter 2: News Framing Theory & Research1. Heider’s view on attribution theory (1959): defined attribution as the perceived link between an observed behavior and a potential cause.

Responsibility for observed actions can be attributed to personal factors or to societal or environmental factors.

Chapter 3: Growing Up with Television: Cultivation Processes1. Message System Analysis: involves the systematic examination of week-long annual samples of network television drama, in order to

reliably delineate selected features and trends in the world that television presents to its viewers.

Chapter 4: Media Consumption & Perceptions of Social Reality: Effects & Underlying Processes1. Determinants of Accessibility: describes the many factors that may influence the ease with which something is recalled including:

frequency & recency of activation, vividness and relations with accessible constructs.a. Frequency and Recency of Activation: Constructs that are frequently activated tend to be easily recalled. If activated frequently

enough, particular constructs may become chronically accessible such that they are spontaneously activated under many different situations. Furthermore, the more recently a construct has been activated, the easier it is to recall.

b. Vividness: More vivid constructs are more easily activated for memory than less vivid ones. c. Relations with Accessible Constructs: As the accessibility of a particular construct increases, so does the accessibility of a

closely related construct.

2. First-order and Second-order Cultivation: Two models that describe the underlying processes of cultivation effects. The two types of judgments differ in how they are constructed, whether it be memory-based or online-based.

a. The process model for first-order effects, which has been referred to as the heuristic processing model of cultivation effects and the accessibility model, starts with two general propositions that are based on the principles of heuristic/sufficiency and accessibility.

i. Television viewing enhances construct accessibility. ii. The social perceptions that serve as indicators of a cultivation effect are memory-based judgments that are constructed

through heuristic processing.iii. “First-order cultivation effects refer to the effects of television on statistical descriptions about the world" (Miller, 2005, p.

287). For example, "a first-order effect would suggest that heavy viewers would overestimate the likelihood of being the victim of a crime" (Miller, 2005, p. 287).

b. Second-order effects are based off of online judgments that are constructed by relying on information as it comes into memory storage from an outside source (i.e. an ad or speech).

i. “Second-order cultivation effects refer to effects on beliefs about the general nature of the world" (Miller, 2005, p. 287). For example, "a second-order effect would suggest that heavy viewers would be more likely to view the world as a mean or scary place" (Miller, 2005, p. 287).

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Pratt 3. Shrum et al.’s (1998) prime and no-prime condition: experiment in which source characteristics were primed prior to judgments made;

participants were either asked about their TV viewing habits prior to making a judgment (source-prime), were told constructs they would be judging appeared more often on TV than in real life (relation-prime), or asked for estimates prior to giving TV viewing info (no-prime); no-prime showed strongest cultivation effects, source-prime second, and finally relation-prime.

Chapter 6: Social Cognitive Theory of Mass Communication1. Exonerative Comparison: relies heavily on moral justification by utilitarian standards. Violence is made morally acceptable by

claiming that one’s harmful actions will prevent more human suffering than they cause.

2. Bandura’s dual path of influence model (p.112): to affect large-scale change, communications systems operate through two pathways:i. In the direct pathway, communications media promote changes by informing, enabling, motivating and guiding

participants;ii. In the socially mediated pathway, media influences are used to link participants to social networks and community

settings.

Chapter 7: Mass Media Attitude Change: Implications of the Elaboration Likelihood Model of Persuasion1. Peripheral vs. Central route of persuasion: Central route involves effortful cognitive activity whereby the person draws upon prior

experience and knowledge in order to carefully scrutinize all of the information relevant to determining the central merits of the position advocated. A peripheral route is used when the motivation or ability to process the issue-relevant information is low.

2. Theory of Reasoned Action: a general approach to the process by which attitudes guide behavior. People are hypothesized to form intentions to perform or not perform behaviors, and these intentions are based on the person’s attitude toward the behavior as well as perceptions of the opinions of significant others (norms). Focuses on the relatively thoughtful processing involved in considering the personal costs and benefits of engaging in behavior, and in one’s perception of the ability to control the behavior.

a. A combination of one’s personal attitudes, perceived norms of influential others and motivation to comply provides a parsimonious model of predictors of intended behavior.

b. This model is derived from expectancy-value theory, which postulates that one’s beliefs about how likely a given behavior leads to certain consequences, multiplied by one’s evaluation of those consequences, are likely to predict attitudes and behavior.

3. Cognitive response theory: developed explicitly to address two key issues unaddressed by the communication/persuasion matrix; the cognitive response approach attempted to account for the low correlation between message learning and persuasion observed in many studies, and for the processes responsible for yielding. This approach contends that the impact of variables on persuasion depend on the extent to which individuals articulate and rehearse their own individual thought to the information present.

Chapter 8: Uses and Gratifications

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Pratt 1. Ritualized Use (p.172): using a medium more habitually to consume time and for diversion; entails greater exposure to and affinity with

the medium; suggests utility but an otherwise less active or less goal-directed state.2. Instrumental Use (p.172): seeking certain message content for informational reasons; entails greater exposure to news and informational

content and perceiving that content to be realistic. Instrumental use is active and purposive; suggests utility, intention, selectivity and involvement.

Chapter 9: Where psychophysiology meets the media: Taking the effects out of mass media research1. Attention in psycho-physiological research (p.189): There are two broad areas of research on attention, selection and effort.

a. Selective attention is related to short-term actions and involves the choice of what aspects of the environment to focus on.b. Effort, on the other hand, is a longer-term component of attention and is related to how hard one is working at processing the

stimulus that has been selected for attention; effort is considered to be the allocation of cognitive resources to encoding the stimulus.

2. Orienting Responses (OR) (p.189) are automatic mechanisms that occur in response to specific mediaa. The orienting response is a short-term response (related to attention) that is associated with a set of brief physiological

changes. Once an OR is elicited, a vrief increase in allocation of processing resources toward the stimulus will occur.i. ORs are associated with increases in skin conductance (SC), deceleration of hear rate (HR), alpha blocking in the

electroencephalogram (EEG), increase in skin temp, increase in vasodilation in the brain and a vasoconstriction in the periphery.

ii. Heart rate deceleration (HR) is said to be the best solo indicator of an OR.

3. Cognitive Effort and Long-term responses (p.191) overall cognitive effort exerted by a media user during message presentation, measured via acceleration/deceleration of the HR

a. Among the content and structural variables that influence the long-term level of cognitive effort allocated to a message are emotion (valence and arousal), structural pacing, and inclusion of sensational packaging features, strong narrative structure and variables related to content difficulty.

b. Valence refers to the un/favorableness of personal thoughts w/respect to message; more favorable = more persuasion

Chapter 10: Media and civic participation: On understanding and misunderstanding communication effects1. Social Capital (p.207): features of social life—networks, norms and trust—that enable participants to act together more effectively to

pursue shared objective.a. Putnam describes social capital as social networks that create norms of reciprocity and trustworthiness. Capital because

networks have value, specifically in improving the productivity of individuals and groups.Chapter 11: Political communication effects1. Knowledge gap (p.232): examines questions about differential rates of knowledge acquisition across different social strata and groups.

a. Knowledge gaps result from such factors as differences in cognitive complexity or processing abilities, disparities in media access and exposure, or differences in the perceived utility of being informed.

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Pratt b. Need for cognition, media choices and interest can also moderate the size of the knowledge gap.

2. Spiral of silence theory (p.233) says that people make “quasi-statistical” judgments about which side is the majority or gaining support on controversial issues. This diminishes opinion expression by the losing side, starting a spiral of silence, and ultimately changing opinions and political behaviors.

Chapter 18: The effects of media on marketing communication1. Advertising Response Function (p.365-366): the hypothesized relationship between the cumulative number of exposures of an

individual (or aggregate of individuals) to communication for a product (within the same medium or across different media), and some dependent variable, such as purchase probability or product knowledge. One of two functions is thought to apply:

a. A gentle s-curve indicating that advertising requires a few exposures to have any impact, a few more exposures to reach its maximum impact, and then a declining marginal impact; and

b. A simple ogive function that also consists of a rapidly rising level of effectiveness with each additional exposure, followed by diminishing marginal impact of each subsequent exposure, but no threshold.

2. Selective Exposure/Perception (p.369, 522-524): People selective attend to information based on its relevance to them at a given point in time.

a. Selective Exposure is the proposition that consumers tend to see and hear communications that are favorable, congenial, or consistent with their predispositions and interests.

i. People select information that is consistent with attitudes and beliefs and ignore information that is discrepant. People attend to messages that “are favorable, congenial, or consistent with their predispositions or interests.”

b. Selective Perception suggests that individual differences play important roles in viewers’ interpretations of media content in ways that may serve to maintain or reinforce existing beliefs.

i. An individuals’ media environment is filled with messages that may conflict with held opinions and beliefs of viewer. Individual differences play a role in how people process conflicting message content

1. Assumptions:a. Individuals judge characters/issues similar to self more favorablyb. Individuals perceive media sources as biased /less credible when stores reported don’t match previously

held attitudes.

3. Word of mouth (p.376): long regarded as the most credible, unbiased and effective form of marketing communication.a. All informal exchange of information among consumers about the characteristics, usage, and ownership of products and

services.b. Viral marketing (p.376) describes the fact that consumers spread a marketer’s message to other consumers with little or no

effort by the marketer.c. Permission marketing is a term coined by Seth Godin [1] used in marketing in general and e-marketing specifically. The

undesirable opposite of permission marketing is interruption marketing. Marketers obtain permission before advancing to the next step in the purchasing process. For example, they ask permission to send email newsletters to prospective customers [2].

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Pratt i.This form of marketing requires that the prospective customer has either given explicit permission for the marketer to

send their promotional message (e.g. an email or catalog request) or implicit permission (e.g. querying a search engine).

4. Role of personal relevance in message persuasion (p.386): consumer involvement refers to a subjective psychological state of the consumer and defines the importance and personal relevance that consumers attach to an advertisement.

Chapter 19: Educational television and interactive media for children: Effects on academic knowledge, skills, and attitudes1. The capacity model of media educational effects (p.423) shares several features with CTML, particularly its roots in cognitive

psychology and the limited capacity of working memory. a. The capacity model argues that the limited capacity of working memory poses challenges for viewers of educational television

programs. b. The capacity model focuses on challenges that stem from the fact that educational television programs typically present

narrative content and educational content simultaneously.c. The model proposes that comprehension of educational content depends, not only on the cognitive demands of processing the

educational content itself, but also on the demands presented by the narrative in which it is embedded. d. The model argues that comprehension is affected by distance, that is, the degree to which the educational content is integral or

tangential to the narrative.i. If distance is large, the mental resources needed for comprehension are generally devoted primarily to the narrative;

less resources are available for processing the educational content.ii. However, if the educational content is integral to the narrative, then the two complement, rather than compete with,

each other.iii. Thus, comprehension of educational content typically would be stronger under any of the following conditions:

1. when the processing demands of the narrative are relatively small2. When the processing demands of the educational content are small3. or when distance is small

2. Cognitive Theory of Multimedia Learning (p.422) is intended to describe the processing by which users encode and learn from multimedia.

a. Has its roots in 3 assumptions that grow out of the research literature in cognitive psychology:i. Humans take in visual and auditory information through 2 separate information-processing channels

ii. That each channel has a limited capacity for processing information at any given timeiii. Active learning entails carrying out a coordinated set of cognitive processes during learning.

b. The model tracks the processing of elements of information through the visual and auditory channels as they make their way through the 3 classic cognitive structures of cognition and memory, sensory memory, working memory, and long-term

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Pratt memory. These two models are then integrated into a single representation in which corresponding elements of the pictorial and verbal models are mapped onto each other.

c. The CTML posits that, when a user engages with an instructional message via multimedia, bits of visual and auditory information are encoded and processed separately, to yield a pictorial mental model of the visual information and a verbal mental model of the auditory information.

Chapter 20: Public communication campaigns: Theoretical principles and practical applications1. Trans-theoretical Model (p.442): identifies sub-audiences on the basis of their stage in the process of behavior change with respect to

a specific health behavior: precontemplation, contemplation, preparation, action or maintenance.a. Progression along these stages is influenced by a variety of processes: consciousness raising, dramatic relief, self-reevaluation,

environmental reevaluation, self-liberation, helping relationships, counter-conditioning, contingency management, stimulus, control and social liberation.

b. Based on the audience’s stage, a campaign should emphasize difference processes, behaviors and messages.

2. Social Network Theory (p.441) looks at the process by which ideas, norms and practices are diffused through ---or rejected by—interpersonal networks because of the strong influence that evaluations and behavior of others—especially opinion leaders—have on network members.

a. Perceived network influence is an important goal as well as a mechanism of campaigns taking social network theory seriously.

3. Integrative theory of behavior change (p.442) integrates three major theories: health belief model, social cognitive theory and the theory of reasoned action.

a. Outcome behaviors are influenced by skills, environmental constraints and intentions.i. Intentions are influenced by skills, and self-efficacy.

ii. Attitudes are influenced by behavioral beliefs and their evaluative aspects. iii. Norms are influenced by normative beliefs and motivations to complyiv. Self-efficacy is influenced by efficacy beliefs.v. All the beliefs are influenced by a variety of external variables, demographics, attitudes, personality traits and other

individual differences.

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