ABSTRACT
This chapter examines violence research from a uses and gratifications tradition, explaining ideas about why audiences choose violent media stories. By the end of this chapter students should be able to identify motives associated with audience choices for violent media and discuss the relationship between morbid and normal curiosity. Sequential Art: “A Morbid Date Night” provides a point of discussion for concepts of normal curiosity, disgust reaction, and sensation seeking when a young woman attends the screening of a classic horror film with her boyfriend. Key Concepts: uses and gratifications, information seeking, dependency model, morbid curiosity, hyper-negative messages, normal curiosity, specific and diversive exploration, perceptual and epistemic curiosity, sensation-seeking and its subscales, cruelty and aggression, disgust reaction, pain and pleasure, eudaimonic motivations, antisocial personality disorder, sociobiological explanation for violence, theory of optimism.
