With video games representing a rapidly growing media platform, current events have pushed conflicts surrounding gender into the spotlight of the video gaming world. Previous research has established sex-typed cognitive advantages as well as sex-typed genre preference of video games. Potential explanations of how these align have been inconclusive. Concurrently, research on sex development has suggested that binary categorizations of sex (physical sex; male or female) don’t capture the full variation of individuals and as such have been recognized as inferior measures of sex. This thesis uses two continuous markers of physical sex (hormonal 2D:4D finger ratio, and continuous skill-based performance) to predict video game preference and playing. Using univariate effect and equivalence tests, we find that binary markers of sex predict game preference, while theoretically more valid continuous markers do not. Our results challenge the notion of binary sex differences in predicting video game preferences, and suggest a more complex relationship between physical sex and video game preferences. Implications for future research on video game playing and sex are discussed.

The Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars details the short- and long-term processes driving media selection, assessment, and production cycles (Tamborini, 2011), however, it does not account for linkages that have been found between biological sex, hormonal stress response, moral judgment, and media preference. The role of sex, stress, hormones, and potential interaction effects on moral media content evaluation were therefore assessed in addition to foundational MIME predictions. It was hypothesized that moral intuitions, sex-specific stress response, and hormonal markers would predict shifts in the salience and perception of care and loyalty. In this study, participants were tracked over two weeks during the highly stressful initial unfolding of the global Coronavirus pandemic. Moral intuitions, psychographics, and demographics were measured, as well as self-reported stress and a battery of life situation and belief variables later used to develop a theoretical stress prediction model. An experimental induction took place halfway through the study, whereby participants were randomly assigned to either a high stress or low stress Coronavirus news prime, and then asked to evaluate two of eight possible stories varying in story condition (care vs. loyalty upheld) and moral conflict (conflict vs. no conflict). Repeated measures analyses were conducted using a Linear Mixed Models Approach. Results failed to replicate well-documented MIME patterns, although various significant interactions between story type, sex, stress, news prime condition, and menstrual phase on both story enjoyment/appreciation and measures of character morality were uncovered. Further, sex differences in sensitivity to different moral foundations, as well as relationships between perceptions of virus threat, notions of purity, xenophobia, and ethnocentrism were found. Possible explanations of unexpected findings are offered. Implications and future directions regarding research and data analysis are discussed.

The impact of narratives is evident in various aspects of society, from literature and historical documents to scientific explanations, political speeches, and everyday conversations. Research has shown that how people interpret narratives can influence cognitive and linguistic behavior. This dissertation focuses on mental models constructed during movie-watching, a particular type of narrative experience. By analyzing multiple existing datasets and designing three studies, this dissertation offers a framework for investigating the role of narrational features in mental model constructions in the brain across three levels (micro, macro, and super) during movie viewing.The first study examines the contributions of narrative and narrational features to macro-level mental model construction in the brain. We found a significant relationship between narrational features and low-level brain regions but not between narrative features and high-level brain regions in the event segmentation results. These low-level regions may not be as sensitive to the specific details of the narrative features as they are to how the story is presented through the narrational features. The narrational features may provide cues or signals to the high-level brain regions, guiding their narrative interpretation. This is consistent with previous research that has found that how a story is told can significantly impact how it is perceived and remembered by audiences. The second study investigates how the brain reacts to narrative features, particularly moral-relevant content, while constructing micro-level mental models. We find consistent results across model that macro-events with more micro-events are more likely to have brain-data boundaries overlapped with human-annotated boundaries. However, our generalized linear models did not find evidence to support our hypothesis that higher levels of moral-relevant content would correspond to higher inter-subject correlations, indicating engagement. The third study investigates how the brain uses narrative and narrational features in super-level mental model construction, specifically in schema maintenance and violation. Our results showed that intra- and inter-subject correlations in the precuneus were significantly higher for the intact clip than for the scrambled clip, indicating the precuneus's involvement in schematic thinking during narrative processing, particularly in posterior medial regions. However, we did not find a significant relationship between inter-subject correlation (i.e., engagement) and the deviation of segments (broken schemas). Researchers in communication and media psychology can learn from the neurological component of this dissertation since it offers a biological perspective and methodological innovations to advance our understanding of narration and narrative effects in the brain. Next, the operationalization of narrative features and links between features or combinations of features and brain activity can be an exemplar for neuroscientists less familiar with media studies.

Given the inherently subjective nature of moral content analysis (MCA), high intercoder reliability (ICR) statistics reported in extant MCA literature have been questioned. This paper argues that greater precision in identifying morally relevant content cues via multidimensional coding schemes can minimize the likelihood of subjective coder interpretations being applied during the coding task, thereby yielding high ICR statistics. Accordingly, and derived from Moral Foundations Questionnaire - 2 (MFQ-2), we offer the seminal version of the Moral Foundations Content Codebook (MFCC-1) which provides a rule-based framework for the identification of morally relevant cues, specifically in visual content. Our findings support the claim that a multidimensional MCA codebook, as opposed to a unidimensional one such as the coding manual for Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME), yields comparatively greater ICR statistics. However, these still remain below thresholds for minimum acceptable reliability. In our post-hoc analyses, we find that acceptable reliability for MFCC-1 can also be achieved but only after constraint adjustment procedures that take into account the degree of coder disagreement (i.e., slight versus severe). Additionally, we observe enhancement of discriminant, predictive, and external validities when using ratings as derived from MFCC-1. We discuss these findings and provide explanations inspired from the cognitive bias literature that speculatively rationalize why coders using unidimensional MCA codebooks, in general, can be expected to perform worse than their counterparts.

Moral judgment, a fundamental aspect of human behavior, involves evaluativedistinctions between actions deemed morally "good" or "bad." This dissertation delves into the cognitive and neurological processes underpinning moral judgment by examining two influential theoretical frameworks: Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and Morality-as-Cooperation (MAC). MFT posits innate moral foundations (e.g., harm, fairness, loyalty) as the basis of morality, while MAC focuses on moral elements (e.g., helping kin, fairness) emerging from cooperation challenges. Despite the pervasive influence of morality research on communication and media content, particularly in areas like moralizing language on social media and persuasion strategies using moral framing, a comprehensive comparison of the neurological underpinnings across these theories has been lacking in the literature. The dissertation reveals neural networks related to the theory of mind to be associated with moral cognition across the two theories. However, it also reveals that the neural representation for each moral foundation and element exhibits distinct patterns. The factorization of neural representations of MFT and MAC provides robust evidence for the theoretical foundations of both frameworks, emphasizing the theoretical overlap of moral domains across the two theories. Moreover, different survey measures for moral sensitivity yield variations in predicting the neural representation of moral cognition, illustrating how a neuroscientific approach can offer additional validations of survey measures.This dissertation offers a nuanced understanding of moral cognition, revealing the complexity of neural representations associated with different moral foundations and elements from two competing theories of moral cognition.

In daily life, moral judgments are embedded in dynamic, complex, and contextualized environments. As we reason about morally right or wrong behaviors, our personal history shapes how we judge who did what to whom, where, when, and why. Yet, surprisingly little is known about how individual differences in moral dispositions modulate shared neural response patterns when processing increasingly complex moral scenarios. Consequently, we herein examine brain-behavior-trait coherence in moral cognition across three datasets of increasing naturalistic complexity. Applying intersubject representational similarity analysis, we demonstrate how between-subject variability in moral dispositions modulates similarity in neural responses when processing decontextualized moral vignettes, auditory movie summaries, political attack advertisement, soap opera clips, and full-length movies. Our approach highlights how brain-behavior-trait relationships during moral cognition are shaped by paradigm choice, and provides a reference for conducting research at the intersection of socio-moral cognition, communication science, and naturalistic neuroimaging.

The recent growth of the neurophysiological paradigm has re-defined important concepts in communication. To better understand of how fictional narratives operate at a neurophysiological level, this study employs a combination of fMRI and face-tracking to explore affective disposition theory (ADT), which predicts that viewers' affective responses lead them to prefer narratives in which virtuous characters are rewarded and immoral characters are punished. Previous work has shown that inter-subject correlations (ISC) in brain activity are highest when viewing disposition-consistent narrative outcomes -- specifically, the punishment of immoral characters. The present study partially replicates these findings and also uses psychophysiological interaction (PPI) analysis to augment the notion that punishment of immoral characters yields discernibly different patterns of brain connectivity than other narrative content. To directly address the affective component of ADT, further PPI analyses compared high- and low-empathy participants. Results indicate that the patterns of co-activation between brain regions revealed through PPI are moderated by trait empathy: seeing good characters rewarded yields the same co-activation patterns among high-empathy individuals as seeing bad characters punished does among low-empathy individuals.

To provide another window into affective processing, automated face-tracking is used to evaluate whether greater ISCs in brain activity also yield greater similarities in the time-course of emotive facial expressions. Results indicate that correlations in facial expression vary systematically by experimental condition, but, contrary to the pattern of neuronal ISC, facial expressions exhibit the greatest correlation in disposition-inconsistent conditions. Furthermore, unlike neuronal ISC, correlations in facial expressions are significantly higher among high-empathy participants. In sum, these results support the view that disposition-consistent narrative content drives inter-subject correlation in brain activity, but that shared brain activity does not yield correlated displays of emotion; instead, emotive displays are moderated by empathy and may play a communicative role in expressing dissatisfaction with disposition-inconsistent narratives. The implications of these findings for further research into the affective component of ADT are discussed.

Cognitive control is an important framework for understanding the neuropsychological processes that underlie and enable the successful completion of everyday tasks. Only recently has research in this area investigated motivational contributions to control allocation. An important gap in our understanding is the way in which intrinsic rewards associated with a task motivate the sustained allocation of cognitive control. In three behavioral and one functional magnetic resonance imaging studies, we use a naturalistic and open-sourced simulator to show that changes in the balance between task difficulty and an individual’s ability to perform the task result in different levels of intrinsic reward, which motivates dynamic shifts between networked brain states. Specifically, high levels of intrinsic reward associated with a balance between task difficulty and individual ability are associated with increased connectivity between cognitive control and reward networks. By comparison, a mismatch between task difficulty and individual ability is associated with lower levels of intrinsic reward and corresponds to increased activity within the default mode network. Insular activation suggests that motivational salience, as defined by the level of intrinsic reward, drives shifts between networked brain states associated with task engagement or disengagement. These results implicate reward processing as a critical component of cognitive control.

The need to develop a robust neurological measure of flow increases as the practical applications of flow become more apparent within the broader communication literature. The Synchronization Theory of Flow (Sync Theory; Weber et al., 2009) offers a neurological perspective of the ‘flow’ state (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), hypothesizing that flow co-occurs with the synchronization of specific attention and reward networks in the brain. As a small step towards better understanding the neurological correlates of flow within the attentional network, we attempt to replicate Weber et al. (2018) using a sample size with increased power. The results from this study emphasize three primary findings that altogether have implications for Sync Theory and our understanding of the neurological basis of flow. First, Weber’s original distraction measure is shown to be a better indicator of flow compared to reaction time measures. Second, functional connectivity between attentional regions is nonlinearly dependent on distraction. Third, Sync Theory’s predictions are demonstrated across some attentional regions, but not others. Results from this study are used to supplement our understanding of the neurological correlates of flow, extend the findings from Weber et al (2018), and comment on the current state of Sync Theory.