Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Common sense holds that exposure to media content can be associated with different levels of excitement and arousal (→  Exposure to Communication Content ). The specific case of a thrilling movie well describes the type of stimuli that come to our mind when using the terms arousal and excitation in everyday language. From a psychological point of view, arousal is conceptualized in more general terms, as a state of alertness and physical excitation elicited by external or internal stimuli, which challenge an adaptive response of the organism. The modern world is complex and rich in stimuli. It is in many respects different from the environment of our early ancestors, which required the organism to be physically prepared for immediate action, e.g., when possible threats entered the field of perception. Although vigorous actions like “fight” or “flight” might be dysfunctional or inappropriate in the daily life of civilized humans, evolution has preserved those basic physiological alarm mechanisms, leaving the organism with a new type of adaptive task: to cope with arousal and excitation without launching atavistic behavioral programs (→  Communibiology ). The narrow view of arousal as suggested by the fight–flight theory ( Cannon 1914 ) only describes an extreme form of bodily excitation, nowadays subsumed under the term “acute stress response.” Arousal has, however, been recognized ... log in or subscribe to read full text