ABSTRACT
In Chapter 1 the use of measures of bodily responses as dependent variables in response to media stimuli were traced across six decades. We saw that physiological indices were not valued for a vast majority of this time span, largely due to the strong influence of behaviorism as a theoretical approach in psychology. It wasn’t until the early 1990s, when media psychology researchers began to conceptualize the audience/medium interaction from an information-processing stand point rather than an S-R behaviorist one, that the quantification of physiological measures during message processing started to be interpreted in ways that made sense—in ways that prevented them from being abandoned and instead used to develop substantial theories of media psychology.
