Processing Radio PSAs: Production Pacing, Arousing Content, and Age

Abstract

This experiment uses the limited capacity model of mediated message processing (LC3MP) to investigate the effects of production pacing and arousing content in radio public service announcements (PSAs) on the emotional and cognitive responses of college-age and tween (9–12-year-olds) participants. The LC3MP predicts that both arousing content and production pacing should increase emotional arousal, physiological arousal, cognitive effort, and encoding up to the point of cognitive overload after which cognitive effort and encoding should decrease. Results showed that, as expected, arousing content did increase emotional arousal and cognitive effort for both tweens and college students, though the effect was larger for college students. For production pacing, however, the results were less clear cut. First, it was found that for radio PSAs pacing increased arousal for calm messages only. Further, the effects of production pacing on cognitive effort were larger for tweens and were experienced primarily during the first 25 seconds of the message, while college students were less affected by production pacing, and those effects appeared in the last 25 seconds of the messages. Finally, none of the messages in this experiment resulted in cognitive overload—thus both production pacing and arousing content increased memory for both groups of participants.

This research is supported by the National Institute for Drug Abuse R01-DA12359-01A.