Last week I presented a short presentation at the “Taking it to the streets: Self-control in everyday life” symposium organized in collaboration with ASPO and ARPH at the VU University. The presentation is of research conducted with Leonard Reinecke and Tilo Hartmann on the role of ego-depletion on negative appraisals of media use. Basically, when you are tired, you want to watch TV or play video games to relax. But we have found that people who are most fatigued from their daily activities are least likely to benefit from the potentially restorative use of entertainment media. The slides from the talk are available below.

Coming soon, I will be at Radboud U. Nijmegen presenting a talk on my recent work understanding morality in narrative persuasion. Information and a brief abstract of the talk is below.

May 28 2013 from 12:30-13:30

Morality in narrative persuasion

Stories have been used throughout history to communicate social information. Narratives increase emotional engagement in viewers by transporting them to the world of the story and characters. But how does narrative persuasion interface with existing, deeply held attitudes such as moral beliefs and social attitudes? The prevailing theory is that narratives work best when reinforcing existing attitudes. But entertainment research suggests that the mechanisms underlying narrative engagement (such as identification) may work even in cases when characters display morals counter to those held by the viewer. Therefore my current research attempts to reconcile persuasion and entertainment findings by testing the role of morality in the attention to and retention of persuasive information in media. This talk will overview theoretical arguments regarding the role of morality in persuasion models, as well as demonstrate practical relevance in using moral framing to increase narrative persuasion effectiveness.