Open AccessThinking and Feeling through Mobile Media and Communication: A Review of Cognitive and Affective Implications
Author(s) -
Morgan Quinn Ross,
Scott W. Campbell
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
review of communication research
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 1.433
H-Index - 4
ISSN - 2255-4165
DOI - 10.12840/issn.2255-4165.031
Subject(s) - scholarship , pleasure , feeling , psychology , mobile media , cognition , social connectedness , new media , sociology , social psychology , multimedia , computer science , political science , neuroscience , law , world wide web
In recent decades, mobile media and communication have become integral to human psychology, including how people think and feel. Although the popular press, parents, and educators often voice concerns about the integration of mobile media into everyday life (e.g., “smartphone addiction”), the growing body of scholarship in this area offers a mix of positive, negative, and conditional effects of mobile media use. This review article traverses this variegated scholarship by assembling cognitive and affective implications of mobile media and communication. It identifies information processing, offloading, spatial cognition, habit, attention, and phantom vibrations as cognitive themes, and feelings of pleasure, stress/anxiety, safety/security, connectedness, and control as affective themes. Along the way, it helps bring structure to this growing and interdisciplinary area of scholarship, ground psychological work on mobile media in theorizing on technological embedding, inform academic and public debates, and identify opportunities for future research.