The emotional profile and processing of emotional stimuli among media multitaskers

Abstract

‘Stay connected, stay updated’ is the motto of the modern digital era which has witnessed a revolution in the media activities and social interaction. One of the offsprings of this revolution is the spurt of media in the social dynamics. This mediated milieu has caused a quantum jump in the ability to utilize media and media devices in our daily lives. It has given birth to a unique community worldwide called media multitaskers who are seen to be juggling with several media/media devices at a particular instant. Formally, media multitasking1 is defined as the simultaneous consumption of two or more media (TV, cell-phone, print, video games and so on and so forth). It may also involve rapid task switching of media related tasks.It is seen that the younger generation succumb mostly to this habit (Voorveld, Seijn, Ketelaar, & Smit, 2014). This behavior has now diffused into every corner of the society so much so that a substantial amount of behavioral studies are, nowadays, devoted to perusing media multitasking behavior of the younger generation (Schuur, Baumgartner, Sumte, & Valkenburg, 2015; Uncapher, et al., 2017). A number of studies also point to the fallouts of too much of concurrent media use. In spite of some adverse consequences, media multitasking is becoming more and more popular, the reason for which may be attributed to emotional gratification of users received from this activity. Hence, this implies that emotion has a significant role in the studies of media multitasking. But there is a dearth of research work focusing on the interplay between emotions and coincident media use behavior. Thus, apart from studying the pattern and predictors of this behavior in the Indian context, another primeobjective of the present thesis is to understand the emotional profiles and the performance in emotional tasks vary for different categories of media multitaskers.2 Motivations for the study Research data showed that the use of digital devices as also media multitasking is on the rise (Voorveld, Seijn, Ketelaar, & Smit, 2014). Though media multitasking may reported to have shown some positive effects (Lui & Wong, 2012), it may give rise to depression, makes one perform worse on cognitive measures of attention, fluid intelligence, leads to impulsivity, and results in difficulties in learning and concentrating on academic activities (Becker, Alzahabi, & Hopwood, 2013; May & Elder, 2018; Schuur, Baumgartner, Sumte, & Valkenburg, 2015). Heavy media multitasking was also seen to be responsible for distraction, information processing overload or poor attention control and hampers human performance during the task (Ophir, Nass, & Wagner, 2009). Though the general consensus says that too much of media multitasking is harmful, yet this behavior, is becoming more and more popular day-by-day. There are several predictors and needs for this behavior, but the emotional gratification is primarily responsible for making people multitask with new media (Wang & Tchernev, 2012). For instance, some researchers inferred that avoidance of boredom andloneliness is the prime motivation for media multitasking. Others suggested that media multitasking gives positive experience and hence individuals enjoy media multitasking. It was also demonstrated that the fear of losing any information or communication compel an individual to frequently check media updates. Researchers found that individuals with higher media multitasking behavior suffer emotionally in the form of disorders such as depression, anxiety, stress etc. (Becker, Alzahabi, & Hopwood, 2013). These studies pointed out the role of emotions in media multitasking behavior as the facilitator and/or as the maintainer of behavior and the outcomes of it. However, there are few shortcomings/limitations in the existing scientific literature that require particular attention.First and foremost, the research so far involved western countries like the USA, the UK as well as some European countries (Netherlands, Hungary etc.) and eastern countries (China, Indonesia, Malaysia etc.). But, attention needs to be paid to study the media multitasking behavior of some of the other under explored countries in which there is a large pool of internet and media users. India is one such example. It has one of the largest internet user bases in the World. Reports (e. g. Millward Brown AdReaction, 2014) establish that multi-screening use in India is about to touch the global average and the usage of smart phones in India is higher than the global average. With the growing use of media devices, it is expected that the media multitasking behavior will be prevalent in India too. Hence, it is necessary to study its impact on the Indian population. It is also important to find out the pattern and predictors of media multitasking behavior of the Indians.Second, recent studies find that the day-to-day activities influence individuals emotions. For instance, individuals experience positivity when they take part in social activities, whereas undesirable work events, negative social interactions induce negative emotions in a person. However, these studies concentrate on single non media-related tasks and hence we may ask ourselves how the inferences will differ when we replace those tasks with media multitasking. Besides, there is also an absence of studies on the emotional differences among the people involved in varying extent of media multitasking. It may so happen that staying away from media multitasking generates more negative feelings in heavy media multitaskers than those who are not much into this behavior. Media multitasking may also create positive feelings. If media multitaskers experience both positive and negative emotions, it is likely that people with different media multitasking habits will experience emotions differently and one needs to verify whether their emotional profiles vary. Third, due to the prevalence of media multitasking, a more thorough understanding of the consequences of media multitasking is of great practical importance. The extant research base in this regard is small, much of it is correlational, and we have a little understanding of the mechanisms by whichexcessive concurrent media use affect an individual. Besides, the data associated with the impact of media multitasking on the processing of emotional stimuli is also limited. 3 Organization of the thesis The thesis is divided into five chapters, the first of which prepares the background of the study. The next three chapters contain the research problem and the respective findings of the thesis. The fifth and last chapter summarizes the studies and includes further discussions for the extension/improvement of the work. Chapter 2: Pattern and Predictors of Media multitasking Behavior of Indian College Students To address limitation 1 (as mentioned in the previous section), the second chapter of this thesis examines media multitasking behavior of the Indian college students, e. g. their media use, media multitasking behavior and the media which they multitask the most with. There are certain variables like age, gender, duration of ownership of media and Big Five personality factors which may act as the predictors of media multitasking behavior and we verified whether they indeed influence the media multitasking behavior of the students. Owing to the fact that the factors like the availability of internet and devices, educational level influence ones media multitasking habit, we conducted our study in a technological institute in India to achieve the maximum possible uniformity among the participants. We first identified the pattern and predictors of media multitasking behavior ofthe Indian students aged between 18 to 24 years, and found out that the participants devoted most of the time surfing websites, engaging in instant messaging or social media use and watching videos on computer. One of the most important quantities in this context is Media Multitasking Index (MMI). The average Media Multitasking Index of the participants was found to be 4.24 which means that the participants used approximately 4 media during a typical media consumption hour. Using k-means cluster analysis, the participants werecategorized into High, Moderate, and Low Media Multitaskers (also termed as HMM, MMM, and LMM respectively) based on their MMI score. Data further indicated that Instant Messaging (IM), sending SMS, web surfing, and using other computer applications were the most chosen media while multitasking, whereas media multitasking was the least during playing computer games, hearing non music audios and during phone calls. Music was found to be the most favorite medium combined with IM, SMS and other computer applications while web surfing was mostly combined with other web surfing activities. Results also suggested that on average participants spend 1.54 hours on typical day in doing media multitasking during face-to-face interaction but the average duration differs from LMM to HMM. The other conclusions which we draw from these studies are as follows:i. The duration of ownership of media was positively related to media multitasking behavior. ii. Higher openness of experience led to higher tendency of media multitasking. iii. No relationship was observed between agreeableness and media multitasking behavior iv. Higher level of neuroticism is positively related with heavy media multitasking behavior. Besides, the other inferences we drew from the studies are: i. There was not much digital divide between the genders and hence the female and the male students displayed similar media multitasking behavior. ii. Age is positively related with the habit of media multitasking such that the media multitasking behavior was found to be more common in the older students. iii. No relationship was observed between conscientiousness and media multitasking behavior. Chapter 3: The Emotional Profile of Different Groups of Media multitaskers This chapter deals with the profiling of media multitaskers emotions with the help of emotional variables like positive and negative emotions, tense and energetic arousal and emotional control. Positive as well as negative emotions and arousal (energetic and tense) are the basic dimensions of emotions (valence and arousal) and hence form a complete set of variables which could represent everyday emotions. The emotional profiles of different categories of media multitaskers are contrasted and following inferences are drawn: i. HMM group experienced higher positive and higher negative emotions in comparison to LMM and MMM. ii. HMM displayed higher tense and energetic arousal in comparison toiii. HMM reflected higher valence (positive and negative) and arousal (energetic and tense) and poorer emotional control in comparison to LMM. Chapter 4: The Processing of Emotional Stimuli among Media multitaskers In this chapter we study the processing of emotional stimuli presented to different groups of media multitaskers who, we speculated, would process emotional stimuli differently. A handful of studies examined the effect of induced emotions on multitasking performance or employed emotional distractors but there was hardly any attempt to study the processing of emotional stimuli among different groups of media multitaskers. We attempted to bridge this gap in our study which was divided into three parts, the first two of which dealt with the facial emotional stimuli and the third one included self-referential emotional words. The tasks corresponding to these studies were as follows: a) emotional dot probe task, b) facial emotion recognition task, c) emotional categorization task, d)emotional recognition task, and e) emotional recall task. These studies were discussed in Subchapters 4A, 4B and 4C in Chapter 4. All these studies were experimentally conducted and were performed on a computer (with the help of OpenSesame software (Mathôt, Schreij, & Theeuwes, 2012)). Inferences drawn from each of the studies are detailed below. Subchapter 4A. From the Study 4A which aimed to investigate the attentional bias of HMM, MMM, and LMM towards emotional stimuli through emotional dot probe task, we infer that HMM oriented their attention towards positive stimuli and they chose to avoid negative stimuli when presented with neutral stimuli......