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#7 – The Psychology of Media & Entertainment with Dr Brendan Rooney & JFL

In this seventh episode of the bodymindself™ podcast psychologist and cognitive scientist John Francis Leader (JFL) meets psychologist Dr Brendan Rooney to discuss the psychology of media and entertainment.

Dr Brendan Rooney’s research interests include how cognitive and emotional processes interact in the context of media, arts and entertainment. He has a strong interest in research design, methods and analysis and teaches on the research methods and statistics modules in the UCD School of Psychology where he also heads up the Media + Entertainment Lab.

Through his research and teaching Dr Brendan Rooney has worked on a number of interdisciplinary and international research teams, with creative and entertainment industry experts (such as animators, filmmakers, and designers), philosophers, computer scientists and engineers, film and humanities scholars, and cognitive neuroscientists.

Dr Brendan Rooney has previously lectured in the Dún Laoghaire Institute of Art, Design and Technology, the National College of Art and Design, and the National Film School. He founded and and is former chair of the Psychological Society of Ireland’s Special Interest Group for Media, The Arts and Cyberpsychology, and he is a member of the Society for the Cognitive Studies of the Moving Image.

The bodymindself™ podcast is an ongoing series of conversations between JFL and others on the topics of applied psychology and cognitive science, experiential learning, perception, virtual and mixed reality, embodiment, mental processes and identification.

The aim of the series is to include the voices of people from very diverse backgrounds, ranging from academia to those working on the frontline in applied fields, with the hope of gaining an even greater systematic understanding of the topics being explored. All references and views expressed are those of the person who expressed them and not necessarily those of JFL.

Your comments, shares, likes and dislikes are very welcome and will help guide future discussions. To stay up to date follow on Twitter, subscribe on SoundCloud or iTunes and visit jfl.com

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References

  1. Psychological Society of Ireland
  2. Special Interest Group for Media, Art & Cyberpsychology (PSI SIGMAC)
  3. Professor Ciarán Benson’s work
  4. Seamus Heaney Lectures at St Patrick’s College, Drumcondra: Seymour Papert
    1. ‘The fire i’ the flint’ Essays on the creative imagination, Four Courts Press
    2. Art, ‘Aubade’ and the edge of forever, Irish Times Article
  5. The Enigma of Reason by Hugo Mercier, Dan Sperber
  6. How Emotions Are Made: The Secret Life of the Brain, Lisa Feldman Barrett
  7. Situation model, cognitive representation, mental model
    1. Mental model general reading, Wikipedia article 
    2. Bower, G. H., & Morrow, D. G. (1989). Mental Models in Narrative Comprehension. Science, 247(4), 44–48.
    3. Swallow, K. M., Barch, D. M., Head, D., Maley, C. J., Holder, D., & Zacks, J. M. (2011). Changes in Events Alter How People Remember Recent Information. Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, 23(5), 1052–1064.
    4. Zwaan, R. (1999). Situation Models: The Mental Leap Into Imagined Worlds. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 8(1), 15–18.
    5. Zwaan, R. A., Langston, M. C., & Graesser, A. C. (1995). The construction of situation models in narrative comprehension: An event-indexing model. Psychological Science, 6(5), 292–297.
  8. Research by Dr Brendan Rooney
    1. University College Dublin
    2. Watching More Closely: Shot Scale Affects Film Viewers’ Theory of Mind Tendency but not Ability, Brendan Rooney and Katalin Bálint
    3. Viewer versus Film: Exploring interaction effects of immersion and cognitive stance on HR and self-report of viewers of short films, Rooney, B., Hennessy E., & Bálint, K
    4. Actually in the cinema: A field study comparing real 3D and 2D movie patrons’ attention, emotion and film satisfaction; Rooney, Brendan; Hennessy, Eilis
  9. Theory of mind
    1. Socioemotional Success Theory of Mind: Understanding Others in a Social World, Brittany N Thompson
    2. Theory of Mind general reading, Wikipedia
  10. VR cafe research by Dr Brendan Rooney
    1. Rooney, B., Balint, K.E., Parsons, T.D., Burke, C., O’Leary, T., Lee, C.T., & Mantei, C. (2017). Attention and Social Cognition in Virtual Reality: The effect of engagement mode and character eye-gaze. Annual Review of CyberTherapy and Telemedicine,15, 82-87
    2. The VR basis
    3. Demonstration on Youtube
  11. Optical illusions
  12. Jurassic Park (1993)
  13. Dual process model
    1. Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
    2. Guardian review of Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman
    3. Dual-Process Theories of Higher Cognition:
      Advancing the Debate, Stanovich and Evans
  14. The Wizard of Oz (1939)
  15. Entertainment is Emotion: The Functional Architecture of the Entertainment Experience, Eduard Sioe-Hao Tan
  16. Matt Bezdek, Georgia Tech
    1. Matt Bezdek bio
    2. Neural evidence that suspense narrows attentional focus, M. A. Bezdek, R. J. Gerrig, W. G. Wenzel, J. Shin, K. Pirog Revill, E. H. Schumacher
  17. The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience, Raymond A. Mar, Keith Oatley
  18. Studies by Dr Brendan Rooney et al comparing 2D and 3D films
    1. The apparent reality of movies and emotional arousal: A study using physiological and self-report measures Rooney, Brendan; Benson, Ciarán; Hennessy, Eilis
    2. Are 3D films more psychologically powerful than 2D, British Psychological Society
  19. Katalin E. Bálint, Tilburg University
    1. Katalin E. Bálint bio
    2. Watching More Closely: Shot Scale Affects Film Viewers’ Theory of Mind Tendency but not Ability, Brendan Rooney and Katalin Bálint
  20. The Wire (2002-2008)
  21. Experiential learning, David Kolb’s work
  22. Situation model – Book vs Film
    1. General reading about models and narrative in film viewing and reading Chapter 2 of this book: Zacks, J. M. (2014). Flicker: Your Brain on Movies. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
    2. Summary article here: Zacks, J. M. (2015). Précis of Flicker: Your Brain on Movies. Projections, 9(1), 1–22.
  23. The Uncanny Valley, Masahiro Mori
  24. Visual adaptation: eyes moved slowly apart
  25. Impossible Puzzle Films: A Cognitive Approach to Contemporary Complex Cinema, Miklós Kiss, Steven Willemsen
  26. Memento (2000)
  27. Looper (2012)
  28. Flow
    1. Flow, the secret to happiness, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi at TED 2004
    2. All About Flow & Positive Psychology, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi
  29. Video games
    1. Is video game violence bad? British Psychological Society
    2. Much Ado About Something: Violent Video Game Effects and a School of Red Herring: Reply to Ferguson and Kilburn (2010) Brad J. Bushman, Hannah R. Rothstein, Craig A. Anderson
    3. Twenty-Five Years of Research on Violence in Digital Games and Aggression Empirical Evidence, Perspectives, and a Debate Gone Astray (2013) Malte Elson, Christopher J. Ferguson
  30. Mario, Nintendo
  31. Tomb Raider
  32. VR/AR/MR tech examples
    1. Virtual reality bodymindself™ podcast feature
    2. Augmented Reality bodymindself™ podcast feature
    3. JFL Mixed Reality Land Rover installation at RDS
  33. Holodeck, Star Trek
  34. Are You Living in a Computer Simulation? by Nick Bostrom
  35. The Matrix (1999)
  36. Betty Crocker’s Egg
  37. Thomas Parsons, University of North Texas
  38. IADT: Institute of Art, Design + Technology
  39. Dr Brendan Rooney on Twitter
  40. Media + Entertainment Lab at the UCD Psychology Department on Twitter
  41. Media + Entertainment Lab at the UCD Psychology Department on Facebook
  42. Controlling emotions: movies & (virtual) reality – TEDx talk by Dr Brendan Rooney

Your comments, shares, likes and dislikes are very welcome and will help guide future discussions. To stay up to date follow on Twitter, subscribe on SoundCloud or iTunes and visit jfl.com