ABSTRACT
The general task of a social scientist is to ask questions about how human beings act within a complex world. For most of you reading this book your specific interests focus on how human beings interact with mediated messages— communications coming from television sets, computer monitors, mobile media devices, radios, game consoles, and the like. Social scientists explore these interactions in a variety of ways. Some take a fine-grained and systematic look at what is contained in the content of media messages using a method called content analysis. Others conduct surveys, using a wide range of instruments (phone interviews, mail surveys, website questionnaires) to assess people’s attitudes toward media-related issues. Most of this book, however, will focus on a third common technique used by social scientists: the laboratory experiment. If you have taken even the most basic high school science class you are somewhat familiar with the steps of experimental research. In a controlled environment a small number of variables are isolated and precisely varied in order to measure the effects of the manipulations on outcome variables of interest. There are fine books available to guide you in the general practice of experimental design (Babbie, 2010; Kirk, 1994). The overarching goal of this book is to show how psychophysiological measures —indices of bodily responses reflecting variation in psychological states—are used in experiments conducted by researchers interested in discovering how the brain processes mediated messages. By the time you are finished you will have a working understanding of what psychophysiological indices validly measure and be able to read the ever-increasing body of work being published in the area, some of which will be reviewed throughout this book.
