Volume 31, Issue 3

An expanding media universe confronts readers, viewers, and users with an abundance of media content that, for the most part, will not be used by the audience, and will, in many cases, not even be considered for use. Selecting what to use and not to use is functional in avoiding information overload (Carlson, 2003) or ‘technostress’ (Rosen and Weil, 1997), but, at the same time, necessary to make use of the media environment. The selection of media initiates gratifications, serves particular functions, enables certain effects, all depending on the perspective. Media use and selectivity constitute a field of remarkable tradition in communication research. The question how individuals deal with media and why they use certain media content has been in the focus of communication research from the very beginning of empirical media research; since Lazarsfeld and his colleagues conducted their radio research projects (Lazarsfeld and Stanton, 1944), which included Herzog's (1944) widely cited study on daytime serial listeners. Thinking about media use reached a first prime with the emergence of Uses and Gratifications approaches; an abundance of studies about ‘what people do with the media’ have been published during the golden years of Uses and Gratifications in the 1970s and 1980s. Bryant and Miron (2004) identified Uses and Gratifications – along with Agenda Setting – as the approach most frequently used in three communication journals from 1956 through 2000.

The desire to experience emotions is widely considered to be a key motivation for media use, especially for the use of media entertainment. But what exactly do people seek when they seek emotions? What kinds of gratifications do they obtain from the experience of emotions during media use? An overview of research on emotional gratifications shows that emotions can be gratifying in multiple ways – ranging from simple hedonistic gratifications to more complex gratifications such as feeling competent or morally good. An integrative framework is outlined that aims at a more systematic understanding of emotional gratifications and their influence on selective media use. We suggest that different aspects of an emotion's gratification potential are appraised simultaneously, and integrated into a holistic appraisal outcome that can be conceptualized as ‘meta-emotion’. Meta-emotions guide the recipient's intuitive decision to accept, or reject a media offer's invitation to experience emotions.

This study explored LaRose and Eastin's (2004) model of media attendance, within a European context. It extended the uses and gratifications (U and G) paradigm within the framework of social cognitive theory (SCT) by instituting new operational measures of gratifications sought, reconstructed as outcome expectations. Although the model of media attendance offers some promising steps forward in measuring media selectivity and usage, and to some extent is applicable to another context of media use, the relative importance of outcome expectancies in explaining media usage and selectivity is not fully supported.

Research on video game violence has focused on the impact of aggression, but has so far neglected the processes and mechanisms underlying the enjoyment of video game violence. The present contribution examines a specific process in this context, namely players' strategies to cope with moral concern that would (in real-life settings) arise from violent actions. Based on Bandura's (2002) theory of moral disengagement, we argue that in order to maintain their enjoyment of game violence, players find effective strategies to avoid or cope with the moral conflict related to their violent behaviors in the game world (‘moral management’). Exploratory interviews with ten players of violent video games revealed some relevance of moral reasoning to their game enjoyment, and several strategies that help players to ‘manage’ moral concern. Most importantly, respondents referred to the game-reality distinction and their focus on winning the game when explaining how violent action is a by-product of good performance. Findings are discussed in light of further theorizing on ‘moral management’ and potential links to the media violence debate.

To examine the psychological origins of sex-typed news preferences, an online newsmagazine was presented to 246 German participants in a quasi-experimental design. The presented articles featured equal portions of social/interpersonal and achievement/performance topics. Newsreaders' selective news exposure was unobtrusively logged. Results show that, even when various intervening factors are eliminated, women read more about social/interpersonal topics than men did, and men spent more time on achievement/performance-related news than women. Newsreaders' self-esteem and gender role orientation influenced the preference of news content. This contribution will also discuss the effects of sex-typed news exposure.

This article argues that a theory of media selectivity needs a theory of attention, because attention to a media stimulus is the starting point of each process of reception. Attention sequences towards media stimuli – pages of newspapers and online-newspapers – were analyzed using eye-tracking patterns from three different perspectives. First, attention patterns were compared under varying task conditions. Second, different types of media were tested. Third, attention sequences towards different forms of news with different design patterns were compared. Attention was seen as a prerequisite for reception: Its selective functions for these processes are especially important. Reception itself was examined within an action-theoretical framework and therefore described as a form of interaction between recipient and the media. Eye-tracking data were used as indicators of attention. Starting with a hypothesis on the impact of different media such as printed newspapers and online newspapers on the agenda-setting process of their audience, the study examined how the type of media and the form of news influences attention and selectivity. Our findings showed that visual cues such as salient photos or graphics and information hierarchies signalled by design and layout guide attention processes, not as an automatic process driven from the bottom up, but as stimuli for an active, intention-driven selection process. The results indicate that the form of news affects these patterns of interactive attention more than the medium itself.

This article sets out to provide a conceptual contribution to theoretical and empirical work on the level of media repertoires. We will first discuss theoretical approaches which allow for an explanation of media repertoires and relate them to the most prominent approaches to selective audience behavior. Secondly, in order to empirically analyze media repertoires we propose a combination of secondary analyses of existing surveys on media use and qualitative studies on the internal ‘architecture’ of these repertoires and their practical meaning in the user's everyday life. These proposals for secondary analyses are illustrated by two examples based on different data sets and referring to different levels of analysis.

Whereas repeated exposure to communication is a widespread phenomenon, it has so far received little attention in communication research. This article takes a step towards describing, differentiating, and explaining repeated exposure to communication. It discusses different forms of repeated exposure and then focuses on repeated exposure to narrative films. It explores possible motivations for reusing the same media content again and again, while taking processes of repeated exposure as well as situational and personal variables into account. The initially theoretical considerations are then supported, expanded, and specified both by existent empirical evidence and findings from a focus group study. Finally, further questions about repeated exposure to narrative content in media are discussed.