2/11 We start with college students; a group that over-indexes on mental health challenges.
In the U.S., 37% report moderate-to-severe depression, 33% anxiety, and 58% loneliness.
They’re also heavy media users.
Depressed? Anxious? Lonely?
What if mental health doesn’t just result from media use, but shapes how we choose media?
In a new preprint, Valerie Klein, @gongxuanjun.bsky.social @aeden.bsky.social and I and I test this using a computational decision-making model: doi.org/10.21203/rs....
🧵Thread
Our work supports the Graph Learning Theory, suggesting that people process and memorize the external environment (language, social actors, events) regulated by principles of graph theory.
Stories that
Stories with an efficient structure and better at managing complexity in their organization of characters, events, and plots (closely connected characters, modular communities, and focalization on characters) tend to facilitate comprehension and engagement with the story, therefore.
This project started with a puzzling question a few years ago: Why was the last season of Game of Thrones so bad? Our research offers a potential answer to this question: the loss of character focalization and breakdown of modular structure hinder audiences' engagement with the stories.
Enjoying Stranger Things during the holiday season? Have you thought about why some stories are more successful than others? Our new preprint investigates this question by studying the character networks in the narratives:
osf.io/preprints/ps...
Our project practices open science practices that the dataset and analytical codes are all available:
github.com/jasongong11/...
Xuanjun (Jason) Gong
Richard Huskey
Richard Huskey
I want to thank my excellent collaborators; this project is impossible without their tremendous and constructive inputs and guidance.
@aeden.bsky.social @fhopp.bsky.social @annawolfe.bsky.social @mattgrizz.bsky.social
