Primary Biological Motivators in Music Media: Motivated Processing of Sex and Violence

This study examined the processing of primary biologically motivating content commonly found in popular music videos-sex and violence-from a motivated cognition perspective (Lang, 2006, 2009). Participants (N = 68) were presented with music videos containing different combinations of primary biologically motivating content (i.e., sex, violence, both, neither). Secondary task reaction times were used to index resources available for encoding and a visual recognition task was applied to measure memory. The results indicate that music videos that contained both sex and violence provided the most engaging and memorable experiences, potentially even flow experiences. Implications for processing these types of information in these ways are discussed and future research is suggested.