Page 89 - Media Effects Advances in Theory and Research

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similar features to a judgment situation. Recall that one of the antecedents
of a construct’s accessibility is its relation to other accessible constructs.
This notion is useful in explaining possible media effects in which the
type of aggressive action viewers observe in media content is only tan-
gentially related to the type of aggressive action taken by viewers, a pat-
tern of results that theories of learning, imitation, or “modeling” (for a
review, see chapter 6) have difficulty addressing (Berkowitz, 1984). In fact,
as Berkowitz notes, the behavioral aggression measures that are used in
studies are often quite different from the aggression observed in the
media portrayals (whether they be experiments or field studies). For
example, Phillips (1983) presented correlational data that showed that
heavy media coverage of heavyweight championship boxing matches
tended to be followed by an increase in homicides in the United States on
certain days within a 10-day period following the fight (but see Freed-
man, 1984, for a criticism of this study). Similar aggression-related effects
of viewing boxing matches have been reported in experimental studies as
well (Turner & Berkowitz, 1972).

Indirect vs. Direct Investigations of Cognitive Processes

The research just presented is suggestive of the role of accessibility as a cog-
nitive mediator of media effects. However, much of the evidence is still
indirect in that many of the studies fall short of actually investigating the
processes themselves, but rather offer process explanations for the obtained
results. Exceptions to this generalization include Zillmann’s work on
excitation-transfer theory (Zillmann, 1983; Zillmann & Zillmann, 1996)
and Berkowitz’s cognitive-neoassociationistic perspective (Berkowitz, 1984).
The following section discusses a series of studies that directly investi-
gate such potential cognitive processes. The results of these studies are
then used as the basis for the development of a detailed cognitive pro-
cessing model that can account for a particular media effect, the cultiva-
tion effect. This model builds on the general principles discussed earlier
(heuristic/sufficiency and accessibility) that underlie social cognition
research.

HEURISTIC PROCESSING MODEL OF CULTIVATION EFFECTS

One area of media effects research that has generated considerable contro-
versy is the research on the cultivation effect (see chapter 2). For the pur-
poses of this discussion, a cultivation effect is defined as a positive rela-
tion between frequency of television viewing and social perceptions that
are congruent with the world as it is portrayed on television, with the pre-