Dr. Daniel G. McDonald
Professor
Contact Information
School of Communication
The Ohio State University
3108 Derby Hall
154 North Oval Mall
Columbus, Ohio 43210-1339
Tel: (614) 292-5811
Fax: (614) 292-2055
mcdonald.221@osu.edu
Qualifications
B.A., University of Florida
M.A., University of Florida
Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison
Profile
Professor McDonald’s
teaching interests are primarily in the areas of mediated
communication. He teaches an undergraduate course in the history of
communication and industry research methods, and graduate level courses
in communication theory.His primary research interest is in the
behavioral, cognitive and affective aspects of the audience’s
experience during mediated communication.
Throughout his
career, Professor McDonald has concentrated on social aspects of the
audience, a narrow area of research referred to as intra-audience
effects. This has taken him in a number of directions, including the
study of how our conceptions of our selves may be partially determined
by the media characters we enjoy watching, and the affective nature of
many of the gratifications we obtain from the media.Most recently, he
has been researching the social nature of the media experience,
centering his interest in a blend of interpersonal and mass
communication processes. Professor McDonald has been examining how
other people affect our own experience.
His
most recent work
in this area is concerned with emotional contagion (in which those
other people who affect our experience are other members of the
audience), affective relations with media characters (in which the
other people involved are not real, but are a product of our
imaginings), and diffusion/use of new TV technologies (the OSU-CTAM
project). Click above for a lengthier description of these
research efforts.