Continuous Emotional Response to the Audio, Visual, and Audiovisual Cha

Television messages can be defined a psychological stimulus (A. Lang, 2000). Within this perspective, mediated messages are assumed to be environmental stimuli that posses survival relevance in the forms of valence and arousal in its content (A. Lang & Friestad, 1993; Wang & A. Lang, 2006). Therefore, mediated messages automatically activate the human motivational systems. Through activating the human motivational system, mediated messages influence human’s ongoing emotional experience (A. Lang, 2006a). Television messages are composed of two streams of variously redundant information, one audio and one video (A. Lang, 2000). These streams of information are continuous, and both the audio and the video channels carry story, content (including motivational significance), and structural information (Basil, 1994a; A. Lang, 2000; Thorson, Reeves, & Schleuder, 1985). Visual channel carries the context in which the story is set; it can include still pictures, moving pictures, text, live action images, animated images, or a combination of these. The auditory channel serves the script or storyline of a television program; it can also have natural sound information, or sound effects (A. Lang, 2006a; Russell, 2002). Regarding the television research under the LC4MP paradigm, it have been discussed the relationship between emotional audiovisual content, emotional experience, and cognitive response. Studies have proved viewers have better memory for arousing or negative audiovisual content (Grabe, A. Lang, & Zhao, 2003; A. Lang et al., 1996). On the other hand, researches also point out that the structural feature in audiovisual messages like fast edits (A. Lang, Zhou, Schwartz, Bolls, & Potter, 2000) or fast pacing (A. Lang, Bolls, Pott... ...teractively activate the motivational systems and determine emotional experience. This study will represent a first to address this important issue. Because the emotional relevance of mediated messages activate the human motivational systems (A. Lang et al., 2007; A. Lang, Shin, & Lee, 2005), it is important to develop understanding of the influence of various channels or modalities on motivational activation and emotional experience. By advancing understandings of motivational activation stands to contribute to knowledge about cognitive processing of information in mediated messages. Automatic allocation of processing resources to cognitive processing of information in audiovisual messages depends largely on motivational activation (A. Lang et al., 1999; A. Lang, Dhillon, & Dong, 1995; A. Lang et al., 1996; A. Lang, Park, Sanders-Jackson, Wilson, & Wang, 2007).