Sarge presentation this week

M.A. student Melanie Sarge will be presenting some of the work she has been doing with Dan McDonald during our ATM meeting this week. The title of her talk is "Loss of Self or Merging Self and Other? Transportation, Empathy and Self-Thoughts." The abstract follows.

Two recent developments in psychology have refocused communication research attention on how empathy and affect come into play in our understanding of media audiences: Transportation and the Interpersonal Reactivity Index (IRI). Transportation and the IRI both include a mix of perspective-taking, fantasy imagining, and the tendency to put ourselves in others’ places.
The present study explores how transportation and empathy are related by examining the relationship between transportation and empathy. We analyze audience members’ thoughts in reaction to media content, and how those thoughts relate to those characteristics which are considered to be the defining characteristics of transportation and empathy so that we can map how self-thoughts relate to transportation and empathy.