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With the mainstreaming of virtual reality and 360° video, media consumption will increasingly include engaging with highly immersive messages alongside more traditional media formats. That means users will need to potentially switch back and forth between highly immersive and relatively non-immersive media messages. However, little is yet known about how transitioning between drastically different immersion levels may affect the cognitive and emotional processing of those messages. This paper presents the first study to examine the nature of excitation transfer effects during transitions across media technologies of different immersive quality. We find support for the existence of transfer of arousal elicited by an initial immersive message (T1 stimulus) to the arousal response elicited by a subsequent non-immersive media experience (T2 stimulus). However, physiological arousal at T2 did not linearly increase with the level of message immersion at T1. Additionally, intra-stimulus patterns suggest excitation escalation and decay during T1 could influence inherent arousal response to the T2 stimulus, highlighting the importance of an analytic strategy that allows for an examination of how excitation transfer dynamically unfolds. Implications and future research directions related to the psychological processing of sequences of messages, particularly those of varied levels of technological immersion, are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study sought to understand how health misperceptions develop among individuals after exposure to misinformation messages, and how eHealth literacy and situational motivation in problem solving are associated with the negative effects of misinformation exposure. We also sought to understand the differentiated effects of misinformation exposure on the four misinformation-susceptible publics. Results from two studies revealed that situational motivation was positively associated with the formation of misperceptions after misinformation exposure as well as individuals’ likelihood of amplifying the misinformation message. However, eHealth literacy does not reduce misperceptions, as had been hypothesized. In fact, eHealth literacy was not significantly associated with misperceptions or with misinformation amplification likelihood. Results also provide support for the typology of misinformation-susceptible publics as misinformation-amplifying publics were the most susceptible to misinformation messages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThe discussion and debates surrounding the robot rights topic demonstrate vast differences in the possible philosophical, ethical, and legal approaches to this question. Without top-down guidance of mutually agreed upon legal and moral imperatives, the public’s attitudes should be an important component of the discussion. However, few studies have been conducted on how the general population views aspects of robot rights. The aim of the current study is to provide a new measurement that may facilitate such research. A Robot Rights and Responsibilities (RRR) scale is developed and tested. An exploratory factor analysis reveals a multi-dimensional construct with three factors—robots’ rights, responsibilities, and capabilities—which are found to concur with theoretically relevant metrics. The RRR scale is contextualized in the ongoing discourse about the legal and moral standing of non-human and artificial entities. Implications for people’s ontological perceptions of machines and suggestions for future empirical research are considered. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile location based services (LBS) often ask users to consent to over disclose location data in exchange for their service. This online experiment manipulated interface features within an LBS consent screen to understand their independent and interactive influence on location data obscurity decisions. Participants (N = 502) were led to believe they were involved in a location-tracking study, allowing for revealed preferences in their decisions. Results indicate that social proof and willingness-to-accept framing positively influenced participants' likelihood to obscure their location data. While the presence of friction and defaults had no direct effect, both interacted with other interface features in influencing decision-making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Digital experiences capture an increasingly large part of life, making them a preferred, if not required, method to describe and theorize about human behavior. Digital media also shape behavior by enabling people to switch between different content easily, and create unique threads of experiences that pass quickly through numerous information categories. Current methods of recording digital experiences provide only partial reconstructions of digital lives that weave – often within seconds – among multiple applications, locations, functions, and media. We describe an end-to-end system for capturing and analyzing the "screenome" of life in media, i.e., the record of individual experiences represented as a sequence of screens that people view and interact with over time. The system includes software that collects screenshots, extracts text and images, and allows searching of a screenshot database. We discuss how the system can be used to elaborate current theories about psychological processing of technology, and suggest new theoretical questions that are enabled by multiple timescale analyses. Capabilities of the system are highlighted with eight research examples that analyze screens from adults who have generated data within the system. We end with a discussion of future uses, limitations, theory, and privacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Personal computers allow multitasking among a greater variety of content than has ever been possible on a single device. We logged all switches made for 4 days for 30 people on personal computers used in natural environments. The median time before a switch occurred was 11 sec, shorter than previously observed. We also measured individual differences in appetitive versus defensive motivations to switch. Those people high on both motivations (Coactives) had the most switches per session. Risk takers had the shortest content segment lengths; risk avoiders and inactives were lower on the number of switches and anticipated arousal. Different patterns of content selection, in addition to switching behavior, were also observed for the different motivation activation groups. Results highlight how threads of experience that mix radically different short media segments may better define how people now search, process, and evaluate information. Implications in light of technological trends and individual differences are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The concept of presence, or “being there” is a frequently emphasized factor in immersive mediated environments. It is often assumed that greater levels of immersive quality elicit higher levels of presence, in turn enhancing the effectiveness of a mediated experience. To investigate this assumption the current meta-analysis synthesizes decades of empirical research examining the effect of immersive system technology on user experiences of presence. Aggregating 115 effect sizes from 83 studies, it finds that technological immersion has a medium-sized effect on presence. Additionally, results show that increased levels of user-tracking, the use of stereoscopic visuals, and wider fields of view of visual displays are significantly more impactful than improvements to most other immersive system features, including quality of visual and auditory content. These findings are discussed in light of theoretical accounts of the presence construct as well as practical implications for design. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Media psychologists have theoretical interests in both people and media, yet research investments considerably favor subjects over stimuli. An analysis of 306 studies, taken from the journalMedia Psychologyover the last 10 years, and from the most cited media experiments in other journals, shows that studies invested in tens of thousands of human subjects but the studies used small samples of media material that were often narrow and unrepresentative. The vast majority of experiments (65%) used single examples of media messages per condition yet they discussed large categories of real world media experiences. Analysis of specific selections showed that media represented in research are less variant, nuanced, and idiosyncratic than media found in the real world. Two categories of solutions are discussed. First, new statistical solutions promote more attention to media repetitions analyzed as random factors. Second, we review the advantages of uncommon research designs that emphasize stimulus investments, including single subject designs that collect intra-individual data and that construct unique models using the entirety, rather than samples, of messages that people experience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]