Past research indicates that people often share awe-inspiring news online. However, little is known about the content of those stories. In this study, more broadly defined “inspirational” articles shared through The New York Times website over a 6-month period were analyzed, with the goals of describing the content and identifying characteristics that might predict inspirationality and measures of retransmission. The results provided a snapshot of content found within inspirational news stories; they also revealed that self-transcendent language use predicted the inspirationality of a news story, as well as how long an article appeared on a most shared list.
Although a great deal of research has examined the potential negative effects of Facebook, studies also show that Facebook use can lead to various positive effects. This study builds on this positive effects scholarship: together, the two studies presented herein aim to provide an understanding of the inspirational content available on Facebook and the way social media users in the United States encounter, recall, and interact with this content. Results from the quantitative content analysis in Study 1 show that inspirational Facebook posts contain similar frequencies of hope and appreciation of beauty and excellent elicitors when compared with other forms of media and social media. Results from the national survey conducted in Study 2 show that social media users are most often inspired by portrayals of kindness and overcoming obstacles and that Facebook users did not report different sharing behavior as compared with users of other social media sites.
Television (TV) is reemerging as a focal point for common experiences and community formation through the use of various digital technologies while viewing. A prominent example of this is second screening, or the use of various technologies to share reactions to and attitudes and opinions about what we see and hear while watching TV with other (virtual) viewers. We contend that second screening requires communication scholars to rethink the nature of the TV entertainment experience, as the practice increasingly blurs lines between interpersonal and mass communication processes. In this article, we introduce a conceptual model designed to identify key issues to be considered and addressed by those seeking to better understand entertainment experiences during socially shared TV viewing.
Rooted in the rich soil of positive psychology, scholarship on the uses and effects of self-transcendent media content that elicits other-oriented emotions has flourished in the past few years, covering a full range of media content such as movies, online videos, social media posts, and news stories. The current research aimed to gain a better understanding of the positive consequences of consuming self-transcendent media with a particular focus on musica medium that is frequently identified as inspiring. Specifically, two studies were conducted to examine the degree to which self-transcendent music (manifested as aweeliciting music) can boost listeners' activated positive affect and prosociality relative both to the natural baseline condition (Study 1) and to amusing/hedonic condition (Study 2). Results show that while awe-eliciting music did not directly contribute to increases of well-being variables compared to amusing music, inspiration was a crucial mediator through which awe-eliciting music exerted influences on participants' perceptions of meaning in life and universality. Results are reflected in the broader context of positive media psychology, and implications for music's potential to inspire are discussed in detail.From folk to pop, from classical to jazz, music has always been part of people's lives ever since humans acquired musical voices. People love music for good reasons: from a psychological perspective, studies have shown that music can be used to induce positive mood (Thompson, Schellenberg, & Husain, 2001) and to improve performances on cognitive tasks (Schellenberg, Nakata, Hunter, & Tamoto, 2007). It is therefore not surprising that listening to music is considered one of the teens' favorite media activities (Rideout, 2015); among adults, listening to music has been found an important source for "inspiration." In fact, a survey with a nationally representative U.S. sample found that 90.5% of adults reported CONTACT Qihao Ji
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.