The Impact of the Media
Kayden Drake
University of Indianapolis

The media has changed drastically over the years and as I have grown older I have come to notice how it is affecting the kids of the generations after me. That is why I picked this study because it explains how media affects kids both physically and mentally.

The Impact of Media Adolescents diagnosed as having or not having clinical depression were asked questions about mood and behavior over the course of several weeks. Responses included self-reports of their current mood state, whether they were currently using media (and what the content was), and their perceptions of the media content they were consuming. Data from adolescents with depression were compared with those of adolescents without disorders to determine whether their gender, diagnosis and current mood state acted independently or interactively to influence the content selected. This data also addressed whether the adolescents’ media choice acted independently or in interaction with gender or diagnosis to influence their later mood. Participants, in their home and social environments, received telephone calls from a trained research associate 12 times over the course of 4 days (Friday through Monday). On each call, participants answered questions in six domains: (a) location/activity at the moment of call; (b) media use and perceived emotional quality; (c) social context (presence of other people); (d) mood; (e) anticipated future events; and (f) significant events during past 24 hours. Not all items were asked on each call to minimize the interruption to the participant’s life. The findings suggest that adolescents are more likely to turn to media after feeling sad or down. Among those adolescents who used media, the emotional quality of their media choice matched their prior positive mood level. In other words, the higher the adolescents’ prior positive mood level, the more fun the emotional quality of the media they later used. Conversely, the lower the adolescents’ prior positive mood level, the less fun their media were. This tendency was apparent for both adolescents with and without depression, as well as for boys and girls. Thus, it appears that the adolescents were choosing media that matched, rather than enhanced, their current positive mood level, whether that level was high or low. Girls’ prior negative mood level did not appear to influence whether they used media later. Boys, on the other hand, seemed to use media only when their moods were not particularly negative. Boys also tended, in general, to use media more often and rate their media as more fun compared to girls. For the most part, boys who were using media were experiencing fairly ‘‘neutral’’ (low positive and low negative) mood states, compared to boys who were not using media. Girls also tended to be feeling less negative during media use, though their positive mood levels did not relate to whether they were consuming media. It is hard to say whether the girls were less effective in reducing negative moods or simply had another goal in mind. Clearly, more research is needed to understand why men and women, and boys and girls, might choose different media based on prior mood and how well those choices satisfy their needs. Granted, examining moods based solely on whether or not media are being consumed tells us little without taking the emotional quality of the chosen media into account. When emotional quality was considered, we found correspondence between the intensity of the adolescents’ positive mood levels and how fun their media were. Thus, adolescents’ media choices appeared to be sustaining positive mood levels. This study has several limitations. First, we are unable to rule out the possibility that adolescents’ mood levels influenced their media perceptions, such that less positive moods led to perceptions that the media were less fun. Fortunately, we see some evidence contrary to this alternate explanation in our face validity assessments, which found correspondence between media perceptions and the actual genres being consumed. This evidence provides hope that the laborious and perhaps impossible task of developing objective measures of attributes for all available content might be unnecessary. Conceptually, the consumers’ perception of the emotional qualities of their media might be the most appropriate measure in any case. Second, the sample is small and might not have included enough variance for the anticipated sad media findings to emerge. We had hints of differences as to how often adolescents with and without depression turned to media, but other media use patterns based on diagnosis did not markedly differ. Because the depressed adolescents’ media use seemed to sustain previously low positive mood levels during consumption, we might surmise that these findings are evidence of reduced motivation to enhance positive moods. A larger sample would likely yield more of the differences we would expect. Thus, mental health status remains an interesting variable worthy of further study when examining media and mood regulation. Despite these limitations, this study expands on the mood management literature to address adolescent media use by adding a level of ecological validity to mood management research. Specifically, this study highlights what kinds of media are chosen, or whether media are chosen at all, given an individual’s prior, current, and subsequent mood states. This research was well developed and had a lot of charts and explanations to really help with the understanding and conduction of their research. I agree with them when they explain how boys seem to be more neutral and calm while using media because that is typically how boys are when it comes to media. On the other hand, I disagree when it says that when girls use media it didn’t affect their prior positive or negative mood because as a girl I know that when I get on the media it will change my mood completely based on what it is that I see on the media. Other than that fact, I completely agree with their study and how they came about doing their research. I am interested in seeing more studies on this and how this study’s statistics will change in the future generation of kids to come.