Mediated Messages and Synchronized Brains

• Published in: The Handbook of Communication Science and Biology pp. 109 - 121
• Main Authors: Schmälzle, Ralf, Grall, Clare
• Format: Book Chapter
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2020
• Edition: 1
• Subjects: Frontoparietal Attention Network; Functional Executive Processing; Vice Versa; Effective Health Messages; Social Brain Networks; ISC; MIDUS; Affection Exchange Theory; Brain Activity Correlations; Task Positive Network; Bilateral Temporoparietal Junction; Mediated Messages; Risk Perception Level; Auditory Cortices; Coarse Spatial Scale; Motivated Political Reasoning; Fusiform Face Area; AET; Recipient's Brain; Higher Order Regions; Continuous Response Measures; MIDUS Study; Sexual Concordance; Individual Brain Regions; Single Brain Regions
• ISBN: 9780815376736; 9780815376712; 0815376715; 0815376731
• DOI: 10.4324/9781351235587-11

When a mediated message is processed by different recipients, it prompts similar responses in separate brains. These hidden, but collectively shared brain responses can be exposed by computing cross-recipient correlations of brain activity time series, called inter-subject correlation (ISC) analysis. This chapter provides an overview of this approach, reviews its findings to date, and discusses why it is highly relevant for communication science. This chapter provides an overview of inter-subject correlation approach, reviews its findings to date, and discusses why it is highly relevant for communication science. Every morning thousands of commuters listen to the same radio program, and every evening millions watch the same news on TV. Large crowds gather to see the same movies, and readers flock around the same top-selling books. The time-course of brain activity in a given region of one recipient's brain is compared with the time-course from the corresponding region in another brain exposed to the same movie. The results reveal commonalities in how brains respond to mediated messages. Mass-mediated messages carry content from a sender via a medium to the receiver. When a given message is processed by many receivers, a natural question to ask is how similarly their brains will respond to the same content.