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Abstract
Recent research has shown that exposure to entertainment media depicting moral beauty may not only influence viewers' affective responses, but also lead to altruistic behavior. Although the process has been tied to a set of feelings commonly referred to as elevation, the mechanisms by which the effects take place have not been examined. This experiment (N = 107) showed that participants who watched a clip portraying moral beauty were more likely to help with an unrelated volunteer task after viewing than those who watched a non-meaningful clip. The effect of the clip was mediated by the degree to which the clip produced mixed affective response in participants. Although the clip portraying moral beauty led to increased empathy with the character and increased feelings of elevation, neither of these predicted helping behavior after controlling for clip content. Helping behavior also increased when the help recipient was less similar to the participants (age, race, and university affiliation).
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Erica Bailey
Erica Bailey (M.A., Virginia Tech) is a doctoral candidate in the College of Communications at Penn State University. Her research focuses on the roles of mood and personality in media selection and media effects.
Bartosz W. Wojdynski
Bartosz W. Wojdynski (Ph.D., University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) is an assistant professor at the Grady College of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Georgia, where he directs the Digital Media Attention and Cognition Lab. His research focuses on the impact of design characteristics in digital media on attention and information processing.