ABSTRACT
Mass communication research has moved to considering the mental processes that underlie media effects. Research has integrated various approaches drawn from cognitive psychology, such as accessibility models, cognitive heuristic models, and depth of processing models to explore how people think about messages to explain the effects of those messages (Lang, Bradley, Chung, & Lee, 2003). Perse (1990b) merged cognitive theory and the uses and gratifications concept of audience activity to propose that cognitive elaboration was an important variable to explain people’s mental involvement and processing of media messages.
