If you take the
stairway down to the basement of the Al Neuharth Media Center, located at the
University of South Dakota, you might think you’re being lead into some kind of
dungeon. But after your brief descent down the narrow stairway into the depths
of the school you'll find yourself in a lab that is not so scary after all, in
fact in its beginning stages the lab looks quite comfortable. It is even equipped
with a bulky, brown, leather recliner for the participants to sit in while
being "studied," and may be the most important tool in the lab.
The lab is
currently in the hands of a team of media researchers (grad students,
undergrads, and faculty) from USD looking to understand how different types of
media affect people physically and psychologically, but what do they really do
in the lab? In short, physiological data are collect through a number of
sensors that are placed on the body of the subject being evaluated.
The researchers
monitor the physiological arousal generated by the body in response to media
being shown. These bodily responses; such as skin conductance, heart rate, and
facial electromyography, are hard to fake making it a reliable way to study the
effects. That is part of what makes the science especially appealing to Dr.
Brandon Nutting, assistant professor of strategic communication and media
psychology.
“I don’t like
things you can’t count or measure, and in this field a lot of the stuff we do
is based on intuition,” said Nutting.
This is still a fairly new science and most of the studies are completely
original and haven’t been done before, so investors don’t want to pay big money
for research that already exists, which nutting believes is a disservice to the
science.
Right now the lab itself isn’t much to look at, but in
the future Nutting hopes that this will grow into something that can be used
for both strategic communication and journalism majors. He hopes that student
interest in the program will grow and will eventually be able to let the lab
grow on its own.
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