Media Use and Effects Review

Comprehensive vocabulary flashcards covering the individual, physiological, cognitive, and macro-level effects of media as discussed in the lecture series.

Core Principle of Media Effects

The concept that media effects are conditional and probabilistic rather than deterministic; media rarely force an outcome but change the probability depending on message, audience, and context factors.

Automatic Processing

A mental state where the mind filters information on "auto pilot," operating without conscious effort to cope with media message saturation.

Task-Switching

The cognitive reality of what is often called multi-tasking; the mind cannot do both at once, leading to weaker attentional control, shallower encoding, and weaker memory formation.

Third-Person-Effect / Overconfidence Bias

The belief that other people are more susceptible to the influence of fake news or media effects than oneself.

Meaning Matching

The information-processing task of recognizing symbols and message elements and retrieving meanings already stored in memory, often becoming automatic through practice.

Meaning Construction

The active process of creating meaning from a message by combining incoming information with existing knowledge using skills like induction, deduction, and synthesis.

Psychological Exposure

The level of media exposure where a message creates a psychological trace; concepts are activated and meaning is attributed to the stimulus.

Inattentional Blindness

The failure to perceive a visible or salient stimulus because cognitive resources are focused elsewhere.

Transported State

An exposure state where a person is deeply immersed in the media experience, experiencing reduced awareness of their real environment, time, and place.

Self-Reflexive State

An exposure state characterized by high awareness of both the media message and one's own processing (metacognition).

Desensitization

A long-term effect where repeated exposure to the same type of content leads to a decrease in emotional or physiological response over time.

Elasticity

A characteristic of the baseline in media influence patterns referring to how flexible or resistant the baseline is to change.

Schema

A cognitive structure representing knowledge about a concept, including its attributes and the relations among them, organized in associated networks of nodes.

Arousal Curvilinear Effect

The principle that media processing is best at moderate levels of arousal; too little leads to low engagement, while too much can cause processing performance to decrease.

Social Learning Theory (Bandura)

The theory that people learn by observing models; behavior is more likely to be imitated if the observed model is rewarded and less likely if the model is punished.

Mere Exposure Effect

The phenomenon where repeated exposure to a stimulus increases familiarity and liking, even without conscious processing.

Parasocial Interaction (PSI)

The psychological connection or sense of relationship a viewer develops with a media character or protagonist.

Media Equation

The hypothesis that people treat media like reality because the human brain is "hardwired" to respond to stimuli as if they were physically present.

Limbic System

A brain network that processes emotional stimuli, adapts behavior to emotional situations, and ensures the storage of memories for significant events.

Orienting Response

An automatic physiological reaction to threats or unusual noises in the environment, typically measured by changes in heart rate and skin conductance.

Flow

A state of optimal experience triggered by a perfect match between the challenges of a task and the skill level of the individual.

Exemplars

Concrete individual cases presented in media that function as cognitive shortcuts, making information highly accessible and potentially biasing perceptions of social reality.

Cultivation Theory

The theory that repeated exposure to media leads individuals to believe that the world depicted in media is the "real world," such as perceiving society as more violent than it is.

Influence of Presumed Influence

An indirect effect where people adapt their own attitudes or behavior based on how they believe the media is influencing others.

Fishbein Expectancy-Value Model

The model defining attitude as the sum of belief strengths multiplied by the evaluation of attributes: $\Sigma (b_i \times e_i)$.

Two-Factor Theory of Emotions

The theory that emotions are composed of physiological arousal (determining intensity) and cognitions (labeling the state qualitatively).

Eudaimonic Experience

A type of media appreciation characterized by truth-seeking, self-reflection, and being emotionally moved, often involving the "sad film paradox."

Mood Management Theory

The theory that individuals select media content to attain, maintain, or alter their mood states based on excitatory potential, absorption potential, semantic affinity, and hedonic valence.

Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB)

A model where behavioral intention is predicted by three factors: attitude toward the behavior, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control.

Entertainment-Education (E-E)

The strategy of embedding prosocial messages within entertaining narratives to influence knowledge, attitudes, and behaviors "through the back door."

Knowledge Gap

The phenomenon where increasing available information in society leads to a widening of the knowledge difference between high-resource and low-resource groups.

Spiral of Silence

The process where individuals who perceive their opinion to be in the minority remain silent due to fear of social isolation, reinforcing the apparent dominance of the majority view.

Mediatization

The implementation of mass media logic within political and institutional processes, reshaping how they operate.

The Medium is the Message (McLuhan)

The concept that the characteristics and structure of the technology itself have more significant social and cognitive effects than the individual content messages consumed.

Narcotizing Dysfunction

A condition where high levels of media consumption create the illusion of being politically involved or informed without resulting in actual participation.

Encoding/Decoding (Stuart Hall)

The theory that media meaning is not fixed; producers encode messages with a "preferred meaning," while audiences may decode them via dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings.

Collective Illusion

A situation where a majority of individuals in a society falsely believe that others hold a certain value or opinion that they actually do not.