McDonald and Meng's research on media enjoyment

On February 29, Dan McDonald and Jingbo Meng will present a paper they co-authored with former OSU student Shu-Fang "Sophia" Lin on media enjoyment. The title of their paper is "Media Enjoyment as Experience: Segmentation, Cohesion and Empathy." The following is an abstract of their paper:

This study examines how audience members’ enjoyment of programs and program segments may differ, and some of the structural factors that may impact enjoyment. Drawing on recent research in psychology and marketing which suggests that people develop expectations about future experiences that are differentially affected by the positive or negative trend of an experience and by the segmentation of that experience, we examine the impact of structure and cohesion on enjoyment, and whether empathy interacts with structural factors in producing enjoyment. Results suggest that the empathy, evaluative trend of the content and cohesion of the content appear to affect media enjoyment in main effects. Segmentation of content does not have a main effect, but instead works in interaction with cohesion; empathy does not interact with the structural factors in affecting enjoyment. Results are discussed in terms of current industry concerns regarding audience behavior and implications for communication research.