Chapter 14

Entertainment Effectiveness

In This Chapter

Appreciating the power of stories to entertain and persuade

Understanding why our brains are attracted to movies and video games

Discovering how product placement works, and why it’s a growing practice in entertainment

Seeing how neuromarketing can be used to test entertainment effectiveness

The media and entertainment industries are massive in their own right. In addition, marketers from other industry sectors are tapping into the connections these industries build with consumers to promote their own brands and products. This is an area where neuromarketing is just beginning to play a role, providing a different perspective on how stories in general, and movies and games in particular, create experiences in people’s minds, both consciously and nonconsciously, that can significantly impact their attitudes, preferences, and actions.

Understanding these impacts is important to marketers and researchers, not only because storytelling is big business, but because it’s a major delivery medium for attitude and behavior change, the heart and soul of marketing. Because a story isn’t an obvious persuasive message, it’s often able to persuade us in ways traditional persuasive messaging (such as advertising) cannot. Marketers are catching on to this, and consumers should as well.

In this chapter, we look at four aspects of entertainment effectiveness:

How stories capture our minds and imaginations

How movies engage us as an audience, not just as individuals

How product placement works in different media

How video games represent a new kind of entertainment that transitions us from entertainment observers to entertainment participants

We conclude with a brief description of neuromarketing methods and techniques that are being applied to test these different types of entertainment experiences.

Why Our Brains Like Stories

The attraction of stories to the human brain appears to be deeply embedded in our biological reward systems. Anyone who has ever read the same story to a toddler a hundred times knows this to be true. Brain scientists have explored this question in detail and have come up with three main benefits that stories provide to the human brain:

Stories activate empathy. Reading or watching stories allows us to experience the feelings of others as if they were our own.

Stories let us simulate situations we haven’t experienced directly. Reading or watching stories allows us to experience situations, times, and places that we could never experience ourselves.

Stories persuade us and help us to learn. Stories have a structure, level of detail, and connectivity of elements that make remembering them and the lessons they entail much easier than when information is organized in less accessible ways.

Empathy is the ability to imagine what other people are thinking and feeling. Neuroscientists have discovered that this ability is associated with a network of cells in the brain called the mirror neuron system (neuron is another word for brain cell). Mirror neurons are activated when we do a physical activity, like peel a banana. What’s interesting is that these same neurons are also activated when we see someone else peel a banana. Mirror neurons allow us to both understand other people’s actions and repeat those actions on our own. They also allow us to feel other people’s emotions as if they were our own — that is, they allow us to empathize with others.

One source of a story’s power is its ability to activate these neurons, to translate a series of words on a page or visual images on a screen into a shared emotional experience.

In a good story, we can literally feel what’s happening and the emotions experienced by the characters, thanks to our mirror neurons. Empathy turns these emotional signals into curiosity about how a story may end. Our emotional connection to the story draws us in, suppressing our awareness of our actual surroundings, allowing us to escape into the unreal, but realistically experienced world of the story. Social psychologists call this feeling transportation, but not in the sense of riding a train. It’s the feeling of being transported out of ordinary reality to a reality of the imagination. As we explain in the “Stories and persuasion” section, later in this chapter, it has a lot to do with the power of stories to persuade us.

This ability to be transported into a story also helps explain why stories are so useful for simulating alternative realities and situations in our minds. An effective narrative offers an important advantage over reality: It delivers sensory experiences and allows us to feel other people’s emotions, but without real physical risk. Most people will never climb Mount Everest, but they can simulate what it must be like by reading the accounts of climbers, all in the safety of their living rooms.

That reminds me of a story . . .

An effective narrative allows us to feel the emotions of its characters, but it also can activate other parts of our brains. For example, research has shown that reading words like lavender, cinnamon, perfume, coffee, or soap activates areas of the brain where smells are processed (called the primary olfactory cortex), exactly as if we were actually smelling them. A metaphor like “The singer had a velvet voice” or “He had leathery hands” activates areas of the brain where we process touch (the sensory cortex). And words describing motion, like “Kick the ball,” activate the areas of the brain that control body movement (the motor cortex).

These are all good examples of how the brain acts as a simulation machine to help us understand the world around us (see Chapter 6). Language is a relatively new capability for mammal brains, which evolved for millions of years without it. It’s rather clever that we’ve repurposed some of our old brain machinery to make sense of this new type of input. In the same way we understand peeling a banana by watching someone do it, we can also understand peeling a banana by listening to someone describe it. From a brain processing perspective, there isn’t much difference between reading about an experience, watching it depicted in a movie, and experiencing it ourselves. In each case, the same neurological areas are activated.

In these and other cases, a narrative activates a wide range of memories that have been shaped by earlier experiences. We can only feel certain emotions and replicate sensory experiences because we’ve had them before. By tapping into these emotional memories, an effective narrative can integrate past real-world experiences into the new imaginary context it creates in our minds. Activating our memories of actual experiences as they’re reflected in the story helps transport us into this imaginary world.

Experiencing stories and narratives in this deep way provides valuable opportunities for learning — without suffering the sometimes bruising consequences of learning in the real world. Reading provides limitless examples of engaging with different types of people, exploring the thoughts and feelings of others, and seeing how situations we’ve never experienced might play out if we did experience them. It isn’t surprising that researchers have found that people who frequently read fiction display a higher degree of empathy for others and are able and willing to see the world from perspectives other than their own.

Pacing and the brain

Since the first stories were told around campfires, orators and storytellers have known that pacing and timing are critical to maintaining interest in a narrative. In particular, a good story carefully lays out an alternating sequence of tension and resolution at various scales throughout the story — from the structure of a single sentence or scene to the overall arc of the story, from the introduction of a problem, to the depiction of obstacles resulting from the problem, to the problem’s resolution and the experience’s impact on the characters.

From a brain processing point of view, this back and forth between tension and resolution can be measured in terms of emotional arousal, as defined in Chapter 6. Arousal is the feeling of intensity or stimulation that accompanies the direct experience of tension, and a drop in arousal is one byproduct of the reward of experiencing a resolution. So, the pace of a story can be measured with arousal measures like electrodermal activity (EDA) and pupil dilation (for more details, see Chapter 16). This has important implications for testing stories in entertainment.

The pacing of a story matters, because the wrong pace is likely to disrupt the recipient’s immersion in the imaginary world. Research has shown that mirror neurons are only activated by behavior that is perceived as purposeful. A story is likely to be seen as lacking purpose when the pace is too slow. Boredom sets in and the imaginary world crumbles.

Confusion is likely to result when the story moves too quickly, forcing the recipient to resort to cognitive thought to work out what’s happening. This will also destroy the imaginary world created by the story, or may prevent the story from engaging the imagination in the first place.

Pace is, therefore, of critical importance because it can enhance or destroy the ability of a story to transport us out of our current reality.

Stories and persuasion

Studies of stories’ ability to transport us into an imaginary world have found a strong relationship between degree of transport and persuasion. When people are deeply transported into a narrative, they find fewer flaws in the story and are more likely to hold beliefs and make evaluations that align with beliefs and evaluations expressed in the story. In contrast, when people are less transported by the story, they’re less likely to hold story-consistent beliefs and evaluations. Interestingly, these results remain consistent whether the story is labeled as fact or fiction.

We can understand these findings in light of our discussion of judgment and decision making in Chapter 8. As we show in that chapter, people’s judgments often are based more on nonconscious feelings than conscious deliberations — that is, they’re governed more by System 1 than System 2 thinking. And when people aren’t engaged in deliberation — as they aren’t when absorbed in a story — they’re less likely to process statements and claims logically, so they’re less likely to generate counterarguments to beliefs and evaluations encountered.

This is why stories have caught the attention of marketers. They present the intriguing possibility of persuading without appearing to be persuading. When deeply immersed in a story, a reader or viewer is more receptive to ideas expressed in the story than he might otherwise be. In fact, while immersed in a story, his pre-existing beliefs and opinions are relatively inaccessible. Which makes marketers extremely curious about how consumers respond to Brad Pitt driving a Prius in a movie, compared to Brad Pitt pitching a Prius in a TV spot.

One place where the question of story persuasiveness has huge implications is in the courtroom, where lawyers and prosecutors try to convince jurors with stories depicting their case. Examining winning and losing legal arguments, psychologists Philip Mazzocco and Melanie Green have identified a number of factors that seem to improve a narrative’s ability to persuade:

Immersive imagery: The story has to deliver enough detail to allow the listener to picture the characters and scenes.

Realism: There has to be a connection to reality that allows the recipient to follow the story. Otherwise, the story doesn’t make sense, bringing the recipient back to reality.

Structure: A good story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. A story that is confusing or that doesn’t follow a natural flow is likely to require more mental effort to be understood, which is likely to diminish its ability to transport its audience.

Isolation from surroundings: The immersion in the imaginary world can be interrupted by extraneous disturbances, such as loud conversations by others, screaming children, or other background noise.

Lack of awareness: When recipients become aware that the purpose of the story is to influence their own attitudes, beliefs, or values (for example, the message of an advertisement), they’re taken into deliberation mode and allocate mental resources to resist the message.

Neuromarketing Goes to the Movies

Movies, which use multisensory inputs and a highly optimized viewing environment (when viewed in a theater), are particularly powerful vehicles for delivering narratives. How movies influence audiences — while at the same time entertaining them — is a multi-billion-dollar question for both the movie industry and other industries that want to present their products within the imaginary worlds that movies create. In this section, we look at three ways neuromarketing research techniques are being used in the movie business:

Testing how well movies create shared entertainment experiences

Helping design persuasive trailers

Measuring the ability of movies to influence consumer behavior

How movies synchronize our brains

Suppose you and your next-door neighbor watch the same movie. Is it possible to tell whether the two of you are having roughly the same experience, or whether you’re experiencing the movie in highly different ways? Neuroscientists in a new field called neurocinematics have begun looking at this question by measuring people’s brain activity while they’re watching movies. They’re finding that it’s a mix of both: Some brain areas seem to synchronize (that is, activate in the same way at the same times), while other brain areas seem to activate differently for different individuals. So, it appears that movies do have some ability to synchronize our minds, as well as our eye movements. But that level of synchronization apparently differs as a function of movie content, editing, and directing style.

In a study published in 2008, neuroscientist Uri Hasson and his colleagues recorded participants’ brain images in a functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) machine while they viewed short excerpts of movies and TV shows. The researchers analyzed not only the brains of each individual but also the extent to which the participants shared the same brain responses at the same moments in the videos.

The findings showed that some films produced considerable synchronization of viewers’ brain activity and eye movements, aligning brain responses and associated mental experiences — perceptions, emotions, thoughts, and attitudes — in response to the unfolding story on the screen. However, this effect was found to vary considerably by type of film. An episode of Larry David’s comedy Curb Your Enthusiasm synchronized only 18 percent of viewers’ brain activity, while an episode of the suspense drama Alfred Hitchcock Presents synchronized 65 percent of brain activity across viewers. In contrast, a one-shot video of New York City’s Washington Square Park, which employed no cinematic devices such as pans, cuts, or close-ups, achieved synchronization of only 5 percent of viewers’ brain activity.

These findings suggest some tentative conclusions:

People respond more similarly to highly arousing, suspenseful stories, perhaps because responses to these fight-or-flight narratives are largely automatic and outside our voluntary control.

People respond in a less synchronized way to comedy, perhaps because humor is more idiosyncratic and based on personal experiences, which may vary considerably from person to person.

A mechanical reproduction of reality, without any cinematic intention or intervention (as represented by the Washington Square video), is not sufficiently compelling to synchronize viewers’ brain activity.

Research such as this opens up a wide area of opportunity for developing objective measures of entertainment effectiveness. Instead of just asking people whether they liked a movie, we can measure the extent to which the movie evoked synchronized brain responses across a cross section of people. The greater the synchronization, the more likely the film is achieving its narrative goals.

How trailers trigger nonconscious goals

A movie trailer is a two-and-a-half-minute mini-movie with one purpose: to get its viewers to go see the movie it describes. As a piece of persuasive messaging, a trailer has to accomplish a number of objectives to achieve its purpose:

It must provide a lot of basic information. This information includes the movie’s genre, its central characters, the actors who perform in it, its location in time and space, and the essence of its plot.

It must convey the emotional tone of the movie. Viewers need to know whether the movie is funny, scary, suspenseful, mysterious, romantic, and so on.

Most important, it must activate a motivational goal. It must leave the viewer with a conscious or nonconscious goal that can only be satisfied by seeing the whole movie.

Trailers have historically been tested with old-fashioned self-reporting methods. People are brought into a theater, shown the trailer (or ten of them), and then asked whether they would go to the movie and why. Neuromarketing techniques bring a different perspective to trailer testing, focusing on how the trailer activates nonconscious and conscious responses in the viewer, such as impressions of novelty and familiarity, nonconscious emotional reactions to different scenes, fluctuations in attention and interest, memory activation, approach or avoidance motivations, and audience synchronization. These techniques provide a battery of summary and moment-to-moment measures that can be used not only to evaluate a trailer’s effectiveness, but also to fine-tune the trailer so it can be made more effective and, ultimately, more persuasive.

The unique insight that brain science and neuromarketing bring to movie-trailer testing is the idea that a trailer can be designed to act as a prime to trigger nonconscious motivational goals, exactly as described in Chapter 7. There are a number of ways a trailer can activate nonconscious goals:

The trailer can trigger our brains’ natural attraction to movies as inherently rewarding experiences that can transport us out of ordinary reality into imaginative reality. To do this, the trailer has to deliver the impression that this movie will be transporting for me. If it does this (by successfully triggering a sense of emotional connection or wonder about the world of the movie), it can activate a powerful goal to seek out and view the movie.

The trailer can trigger memories of actors or a director the viewer has enjoyed in the past, thus activating the goal to repeat those prior positive experiences.

The trailer can pose a question or sketch a conflict or challenge that arouses the viewer’s curiosity. Wanting to know how the story will end can activate a strong motivational goal to see the movie.

The trailer can activate social goals by subtly reminding viewers that their friends will want to see this movie and that they may enjoy higher social status or other self-enhancing goals by seeing the movie.

The trailer can activate prior experiences with a movie studio. Studios are brands that can trigger distinct associations for movies they produce. Just knowing a movie is from Disney, for example, may prime a viewing goal in a child or parent of a child. Strong studio brands that are associated with particular values or types of movies, such as Marvel or Pixar, may also activate particular values or create expectations that can translate into goal activation to see a movie.

As detailed in Chapter 7, a nonconscious goal, once activated, will be pursued until it’s satisfied or abandoned. It will be resumed if interrupted and rerouted if confronted by an obstacle. And it will become stronger the longer it remains unsatisfied. Given these attributes, it isn’t surprising that movie makers and marketers have become extremely interested in how trailers can be constructed to activate nonconscious goals and tested to see if they’re succeeding in doing so.

How movies influence behavior

Movies should be a natural source of behavioral priming, influencing both nonconscious goals and subsequent behaviors. Coming out of a superhero movie, don’t we all feel a little more empowered, a little more able to accomplish whatever goals we’re pursuing in our lives? And doesn’t that affect how we think and act, at least for a little while?

But the academic literature on nonconscious processing hasn’t explored the priming effects of movie viewing, probably because movies are too rich a source of priming to be used in controlled experiments. Because so many goals and behaviors may be primed by a movie experience, separate impacts can’t be unraveled and measured in a controlled study.

We do know from other research that movies and related entertainment experiences can influence behavior. For example, many studies of aggressive behavior and violent media have found that exposure to violent movies and TV shows can cause an increase in aggressive and violent behavior in children and adults. Although the exact nature of this connection is subject to ongoing debate, the existence of a priming effect is not disputed.

Given the general way that priming works, it’s also likely that movies can prime pro-social or altruistic behavior. Certainly this kind of effect has been seen with other, less complex types of primes. For example, we describe an experiment in Chapter 5 in which simply having a backpack on the table (versus a briefcase) primes more cooperative behavior among college students in a bargaining game. Positive behavior priming by movies is a fascinating topic we expect to see covered in much more depth in future neuromarketing research.

One type of movie priming that has been explored in some detail is the effect of movie experiences on consumer behavior. Here most of the focus has been on product or brand placement, and how such placements impact later product choice. Some positive effects have been observed, as we describe in the next section.

Product Placement in Movies, TV Shows, and Beyond

Products seem to be popping up everywhere in entertainment these days. Not just in movies and TV shows, where they’ve become standard fare, but in other kinds of media as well, such as video games, music videos, online videos, magazine articles, and clothing. They’ve even begun to appear in places that would’ve been unthinkable only a few years ago, like novels, comic books, and Broadway plays.

Product placement has become big business, with costs ranging from $10,000 to hundreds of thousands of dollars per exposure. Global expenditures for product placement were estimated at over $8 billion in 2012, with over 75 percent of U.S. prime-time TV shows now using product placements in their episodes.

One reason consistently cited for the growth in product placement is the fact that over 40 percent of U.S. homes now have digital video recorders (DVRs), which allow TV viewers to fast-forward through ads. In order to reach those consumers who may be voluntarily diminishing their traditional ad input, marketers have zeroed in on the next best thing, placing their products directly into the entertainment itself. But does it work?

Neuromarketing principles behind product placement

Neuromarketing and its underlying brain sciences tell us that product placement should work, but not in a way that can be easily measured by traditional survey research techniques. Although many researchers try to measure the effects of product placement using verbal self-reports of attention, interest, awareness, recall, recognition, attitude change, and purchase intent, these measures are likely to underestimate or miss the most important effects of product placement because they can’t measure the key brain processes involved.

From a neuromarketing perspective, there are two critical outcomes of a product placement:

The activation of a brand memory in the consumer’s mind, which may be implicit

The conversion of that brand memory into a purchase, which may not occur until long after

The connection between the brand memory and purchase behavior is goal activation, possibly a conscious goal that the consumer is aware of, but more likely a nonconscious goal primed by the product placement below the consumer’s conscious awareness. A product placement is more likely to achieve this conversion if three features are present:

The product placement strengthens an existing brand memory instead of forming a new one. It’s rare for product placement to be used for a new brand or product.

It leverages existing associations with that brand, preferably in fresh and novel ways (such as was done with the placement of BMW cars in James Bond movies).

These new associations link to the brand with strong, positive emotions.

A benefit enjoyed by product placements that are not available to traditional advertising is the fact that the product is presented within a narrative story. As described earlier in this chapter, the more deeply a viewer is transported by an engaging narrative, the less access he’ll have to deliberative and logical thinking about what he’s watching. This means he’ll be more receptive to the ideas presented in the story and less questioning of any claims made or implied as a part of the narrative.

When product placement is added to this mix, the implication is clear: Reactions to the product may bypass the vigilance and counterarguing that would normally be triggered if the product were appearing in a traditional ad. In effect, the story placement allows the product to ride on top of the receptive feelings produced by the narrative, allowing it to share in the suspension of disbelief that accompanies any deeply transporting narrative experience. The enhanced persuasion that has been found to accompany transporting narratives is suddenly available to the product as well.

Neuromarketing also helps us understand how a memory created by not paying attention to something can show up influencing purchasing behavior at a later time. The mechanism, introduced in Chapter 5, is implicit memory, the effortless, automatic, unintentional form of memory that accompanies much of our brains’ nonconscious processing.

Product placement gets results

As an indirect measure, the rapidly rising marketing expenditures being put into product placement provide strong evidence that advertisers feel they’re getting something for their money. Academic research on product placement also generally finds that it works, even though much of this work relies on explicit memory measures only.

One recent study that examined both implicit and explicit effects of product placement strongly supported the effectiveness of the practice. Researchers Yang and Roskos-Ewoldsen looked at three types of product placement: products integrated into the storyline, products used by a character, and products appearing in the background. Measuring explicit memory, implicit memory, and later product selection, they found support for strong product placement effects:

When a product was part of the story or used by a character, viewers had better explicit memory for it than when it appeared in the background only.

When viewers had seen a product, they were more likely to fill in a partially completed word with the product brand name (for example, “COKE” for “C _ K E”) than viewers who hadn’t seen that product. This was true no matter how the product was used in the story.

When offered a product choice after completing the experiment, viewers were more likely to pick the product they had seen in the story. Again, this was true no matter how the product was used in the story.

The Future of Entertainment: Immersive Games and Simulations

The year 2008 was a landmark for the video-game industry — it was the year worldwide video-game sales first surpassed movie sales. Video games represent something fundamentally new in the evolution of entertainment: the transition from viewer to player at the center of the entertainment experience. Ever-accelerating computer technology has enabled game designers to enhance the realism of gaming environments and the power of games to immerse players in simulated worlds and stories. Interactivity and the ability to control the flow of a game through player actions have added another dimension unavailable in traditional, passive-media experiences, such as TV or movies.

Video games, with their rapid, immersive, emotionally charged, interactive experiences, are natural targets for neuromarketing research because it’s almost impossible for people to describe what they’re feeling as they engage in such an experience.

Immersion and “presence” in online and video games

We’ve seen how movies can transport a viewer into an imaginary world, delivering quasi-experiences. Games can take this immersive effect to an even higher level by allowing players to become active participants in the imaginary world created.

In gaming research, the term presence is often used to describe the immersive experience created by the game. Presence is the degree to which the player feels she’s fully transported into the game experience. Full presence means the player has become unaware of her actual physical surroundings and is focused almost exclusively on sensory inputs coming from the game.

Presence in gaming has been studied extensively. One source of greater experienced presence is the technical quality of the game, including its screen resolution and responsiveness to the player’s actions. As games have gotten more sophisticated, a strong positive effect of story or narrative on presence has also been observed. In a study comparing story-driven and non-story-driven games, it was found that story increased not only sense of presence, but also emotional arousal, identification with characters, and overall satisfaction with the gameplay experience. Adding narratives to games definitely appears to make them more interactive, more immersive, and more involving, as a brain science perspective would predict.

Product placement in immersive games

Several studies have examined the role of product and brand placement within video games. For the most part, the results have been similar to those for product placement in movies. In-game product placement succeeds when

It aligns with the type and mood of the game.

It doesn’t disrupt the game’s flow or delay the game’s rewards.

It feels like a natural extension of the game.

As in other forms of entertainment, as long as the immersive experience is not disrupted by the product placement, a less vigilant mind-set induced by the experience appears to increase nonconscious priming of product-friendly goals, improve attitudes, and increase product and brand purchasing.

Getting back to planet Earth: Aftereffects of game immersion

Researchers have reported several significant aftereffects of immersive gaming, some of which seem to be beneficial, and others of which seem to be worrisome.

On the beneficial side, playing video games appears to increase perceptual skills and hand-eye coordination. Studies have found that habitual game players have faster reflexes, better peripheral vision, increased visual attention, and greater spatial discrimination than nonplayers. Such findings help explain otherwise puzzling results like the observation that some surgeons who excel at video games make 47 percent fewer errors and work 39 percent faster than their peers.

Results with regard to social behavior are more mixed. Most of this research has focused on the aftereffects of playing violent games, and these, like the violence-and-movies studies, have found evidence of increased antisocial behavior after playing violent games, among both children and adults. Scientists also have expressed concerns that games may contribute to declining empathy levels. In contrast, studies of collaboration in multiplayer games have found that players can act more cooperatively in real life after engaging in cooperative behavior in a video game.

Looking at these results from the perspective of neuromarketing and brain science, this mix of positive and negative effects of gaming is not surprising. One thing modern brain science tells us is that we’re much more influenced by whatever situation we’re in and whatever task we’re performing than we’re able to recognize consciously. These impacts are usually relatively short-lived. Longer-term impacts deserve ongoing study as well, but they usually involve not just a situational cue, but an individual personality issue as well, so they can’t be simplistically attributed to gaming by itself.

Using Neuromarketing to Test Entertainment

Unlike testing marketing materials, where effectiveness is ultimately a function of later behavior (choice, purchase), entertainment testing is mostly about whether the experience right now is effective. So, the focus, for the most part, is on immediate, moment-to-moment measures, as well as on how those measures play out over the duration of the experience, rather than in any single moment.

Measuring physiological responses to entertainment

Transport, immersion, and presence are all highly emotional experiences. Arousal, the pace of tension and release, and the ebb and flow of emotional valence (pleasure, displeasure) are all critical to the quality of the experience. Given these criteria, biometric measures such as the following have generally been the method of choice for measuring entertainment:

EDA: Measures the production of perspiration on the skin. It’s a reliable measure of emotional arousal, especially over longer time frames. It’s simple to administer, and it has been employed in many entertainment studies.

Electromyography (EMG): Measures micro-muscle movement. It’s a reliable measure of emotional valence, and it also performs well over longer time frames. EMG is usually applied to the “smile” or “frown” muscles, but it can also be applied to other muscles, like neck, shoulder, and jaw, which tend to be involved in states of anxiety and tension. It has also been employed in a large number of entertainment studies.

Other biometric measures that have been found to provide useful information on emotional responses to entertainment include pupil dilation, heart rate, and respiration.

Measuring brain and behavioral responses to entertainment

Examples of brain-response methods being applied to entertainment testing are less common:

fMRI: Has been used in some very sophisticated entertainment studies, like the audience synchronization study described in the section “How movies synchronize our brains,” earlier in this chapter. But it suffers from being a very unnatural and uncomfortable setting for longer-duration testing.

Electroencephalography (EEG): Has been used only infrequently for entertainment testing, in part because of issues with longer-duration testing, due to its sensitivity to body movement and muscle tension, both of which are common when engaged in a highly arousing entertainment experience.

Behavioral testing is less relevant to measuring entertainment experience in the moment. But when aftereffects are the focus — such as when testing whether product placement is impacting implicit memory or product choice — behavioral testing is the only way to go.