Self-transcendent Media Experiences: Taking Meaningful Media to a Higher Level

Abstract

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Self-transcendent emotions and social media: Exploring the content and consumers of inspirational Facebook posts

“…Scholars have recently turned their attention to exploring how experiences with media might promote greater social connectedness, well-being, and human flourishing (see Reinecke & Oliver, 2016). For instance, scholars have recently begun exploring self-transcendent media content (see Oliver, et al, 2018); others refer to such content as "inspirational" (e.g., Tsay-Vogel & Krakowiak, 2016). Inspirational content can readily be found across a variety of media sources, including social media platforms like Facebook.…”

“…Indeed, in a social media world where content varies so extremely, some posts are more likely to elicit positive emotions than others. As one example, scholars have begun exploring the positive emotional responses to self-transcendent media content (see Oliver, et al, 2018). Self-transcendent content prompts audience members to recognize in themselves elements of shared humanity and their own potential for moral beauty, that is, their own potential to behave in morally virtuous ways (see Diessner, Solom, Frost, Parsons & Davidson [2008] for a discussion of moral beauty).…”

“…These experiences are particularly important because they promote the development of trait transcendence (Peterson & Seligman, 2004), which is the disposition to seek and to make connections with things higher or greater than the self. Trait transcendence is associated with a universalist perspective, reflecting a self-in-other and other-in-self orientation (Oliver et al, 2018), and this "others-praising" perspective of trait transcendence is manifest through four basic types of behavior (Peterson & Seligman, 2004): an active appreciation of beauty and excellence, demonstrating gratitude, enacting hope, and practicing religiousness/spirituality. Thus, as one models these behaviors, s/he both displays and develops trait transcendence, which can lead to greater psychological wellbeing, altruism, and helping (Peterson & Seligman, 2004).…”

How do people evaluate movies? Insights from the Associative–Propositional Evaluation Model

“…Especially, cognitive research on films (e.g., Bordwell, 1985;Ohler, 1994;Schwan, 2001) can be more strongly connected to emotion-focused entertainment research and give insights into how film-related information is mentally represented and thus can be used to alter such representations. Moreover, recent concepts like eudaimonic or self-transcendent entertainment experiences (e.g., Oliver et al, 2018) heavily rely on evaluative representations and processes. Thus, revisiting such concepts through the lens of associative and EVALUATING MOVIES 26 propositional processes and appropriate ways of measuring implicit and explicit evaluation could enrich theorizing about eudaimonic and self-transcendent entertainment experiences.…”

Henosis Experience in Gaming: A Metric for Adjustments to Global Schema and Appraised Meaning

“…Unsurprisingly, many scholars have rightly pointed out that the notion of meaningfulness as a media experience is quite multifaceted (Wirth, Hofer, & Schramm, 2012), and that further research and theorizing is needed to account for its manifestations and underlying psychological components. There have been promising advances on this front in terms of different emotional underpinnings of meaningful media experiences (e.g., Oliver et al, 2018). However, the bulk of this research focuses on experiences which can be gleaned from both interactive and noninteractive media, and it has only been recently that the meaningful side of video games, a medium whose interactivity poses potentially novel ways to experience meaningfulness, has begun to receive scholarly attention (Oliver et al, 2016;Schafer & Yu, 2011;Seaborn, Pennefather, & Fels, 2019).…”