Fundamental Assumptions
Based on the hedonistic premise that individuals are motivated for pleasure and against pain, mood management theory states that, to the extent possible, individuals tend to arrange their environment so that good mood (commonly pleasure) is maximized or maintained, and bad mood (commonly pain) is diminished or alleviated. Environmental arrangement can take many forms, including psychically moving away from or avoiding situations that creates negative effect (such as avoiding a stressful traffic jam), or moving toward or selecting situations that result in gratification (such as strolling in a beautiful garden). Moreover, since entertainment provides its audience with the opportunity to symbolically arrange the environment, mood management theory states that people’s entertainment choices should similarly serve the management of moods (Oliver, 2003).
The specific hypotheses of mood management theory have been summarized as follows by Zillmann (2000):
The indicated hedonistic objective is best served by selective exposure to material that (a) is excitationally opposite to prevailing states associated with noxiously experienced hypo- or hyperarousal, (b) has positive hedonic value above that of prevailing states, and (c) in hedonically negative states, has little or no semantic affinity with the prevailing states.
Although mood management suggests that individuals’ behaviors often conform to the hedonistic assumption, this theory also makes clear that individuals are not necessarily aware of their motivation. Rather, people are thought to initially arrange their environments in a random fashion, and arrangements that are incidentally made during good moods and that extend or enhance the hedonically positive state leave a memory trace that increases the likelihood for making similar stimulus arrangements under similar circumstances (Zillmann, 1988a, 1988b). In other words, the formation of these preferences is controlled by a mechanism called operant conditioning, which refers to the use of consequences to modify the occurrence and form of behavior.
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