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Vita
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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 area of mediated
communication. He teaches undergraduate courses in the history of
communication and in industry research methods. He teaches graduate level courses
in communication theory. This year, he is teaching a graduate class on media entertainment. 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. He often says that all media use is a social experience, but most recently he
has been researching the explicitly social nature of the audience, centering his interest in a blend of interpersonal and mass
communication processes.
His
recent work has focused on social aspects of our thoughts while using media, 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). He has also been doing some work on the diffusion/use of new TV technologies (the OSU-CTAM
project) and media multitasking/simultaneous multiple media use. Click above for a lengthier description of these
research efforts.
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