By: Lindsey Levine, Samantha Garcia, Leila Martin, Allison Goyich
Professor Cynthia King, Ph.D. Courtesy of the CSUF Communications Department
For our scholar interview, we had the pleasure of interviewing Dr. Cynthia King about her research article titled, “Effects of Humorous Heroes and Villains in Violent Action Films.” Professor Cynthia King, Ph.D, has a master’s degree in political science and earned her doctorate in mass communication. Her published research focuses on entertainment and commercial media’s effect on humor and emotion. To gain insight and feedback on our own research as well as her own, we asked Dr. King to explain her research and how it pertains to our question, as well as provide advice and constructive feedback on how we should conduct our research. Our research question is, “How does music consumption affect the overall mood of college students?” The following analysis includes detailed explanations of Dr. King’s responses to our questions, as well as a recording of our interview that highlights the essence and purpose of our call.
Q1: What motivated you to conduct research about the topic of humorous heroes and villains, and what was your ultimate end goal?
Originally, Dr. King was going to pick a completely different field of research. She was going to do a health communications study, but during her time as a graduate student, Dr. King had an assistantship as a Guggenheim fellow in media violence. Throughout her assistantship, she conducted a wide variety of media violence research. Dr. King took a course that focused solely on humor and humor theories where she realized there were a large number of movies that had action comedy, but also action movies with sarcastic one-liners. She wondered, “What happens when we put violence and add humor and comedy together?” She expressed, “There can be quite a lot of hostility in humor.” That’s when Dr. King got the idea of studying, “What happens when the bad guy is the butt of the joke? What happens when it’s the good guy? What happens when you add violence to that?” Looking at communications theories and considering their implications was how Dr. King came up with the overall design and questions for her research.
Q2: What led you to deciding your sample size would be 80 males and 80 females, and what was your reasoning behind choosing from a pool of undergraduate students in communications courses?
In terms of sampling, Dr. King wanted to examine gender because when it comes to both violence and humor, there are quite a few differences determined by gender. Her main goal is specifically focusing on gender was to see if men and women responded differently. Dr. King knew she needed to have a lot of each (men and women), and the reason she chose students majoring in communications was because they were the most convenient and the easiest to access. However, she would argue that, “In an experiment, you are less concerned about what we call external validity.” This way the environment can be controlled and to see if the same type of people’s effects can be made. It is important to isolate the things you’re interested in studying and to make sure to compare everyone who is similar. Dr. King says, “Having people randomly sampled so that I could know that the only difference at the end of my study was my manipulation and not because of different people.” Also, she was less concerned with having every major represented, and more concerned with who was readily available. She chose students who were already in a subject pool for participating in studies such as the one she was conducting.
Q3: Were there any roadblocks that you faced throughout the course of your experiment/any substantial setbacks?
Dr. King mentioned that the biggest roadblock she faced throughout the course of her experiment was creating the stimulus material. She explained to our group that with the stimulus material she had to craft different versions of the same film, meaning she was personally the one editing every clip. In these different edits, she created one with just the hero talking, one that had just the villain talking, and one that had both the hero and villain talking. Although creating the edits was her biggest challenge, Dr. King shared that she had a lot of fun forming the different edits and grew a deep appreciation for those whose careers are focused on editing.
Q4: Was there anything surprising or shocking that you discovered when you were reviewing your results?
When asked this question, Dr. King first mentioned that she went back and ended up rewriting the first part of her paper since her results were so tricky. This was due to the fact that she noticed men and women truthfully do interpret things differently, and she had to figure out why that was. Reflecting on her research, she expressed how she was thankful that she had done ratings with her questions. She had asked her participants to rate the characters themselves, as well as what they thought about the characters since that was extremely critical for her results. In this research, Dr. King noticed that males thought the jokes in the movie were funny, whereas women thought the jokes were not humorous, but almost vicious.
Q5: If you had the opportunity to conduct this experiment again, is there anything you would do differently?
Dr. King was piggybacking off of multiple ideas when discussing what she would have done differently if she had the opportunity to conduct this experiment again, but she did emphasize that she was relatively pleased with how her experiment played out results-wise. One thing she did mention is that she wishes she had more time to find better stimulus material for her participants. Dr. King feels as though her results may have differed had she used a spoof of a horror-action film, or a different film that focused less on “one-liner” comedic remarks. She also expressed her curiosity in discovering if women would have found the violence less intense had there been humor involved. We may eventually see new research from her on that topic.
Photo courtesy of Anders Førde Midtbø and Stefan Korssund Andrianopoulos. Bachelor’s thesis: “Measuring elements that influence mood management in music.”
Q6: Our research question is: “How does music consumption affect the overall mood of college students?” We’re planning on creating a survey and sending it out to as many college students as possible. Are there any overall tips you have for us? Anything you recommend we do/don’t do?
Our term project and research question are still a work in progress, so by asking Dr. King her opinion on our general idea and question, we were hoping to receive feedback and advice to use moving forward in our process. The first piece of advice Dr. King provided was that it could potentially be a challenge trying to study mood with a survey because of the fact that mood is not something that lasts. She explained that asking someone how music affects them is simply an opinion, not an effects study. However, one solution she provided was embedding music clips into our survey in order for us to have something tangible to measure. We could follow the different music clips with questions regarding mood and feelings. Dr. King praised our idea of surveying people about their choices when it comes to actually consuming music, including questions about what platforms they use and whether they consume music actively or passively. She also graciously explained the Uses and Gratifications Theory to us and how that could apply to our study by discovering why people listen to music, and how they use music to regulate their mood.
Our interview with Dr. King provided us with valuable and constructive feedback that we will use to improve our research question and the overall quality of our term project. We thank Dr. King for generously taking time out of her day to enlighten us with her plentiful background as a scholar!
The Society for Communications Research 