The Jaime Vila Lab in Media Psychology, recently launched in the framework of the Communication, Advertising and Society research group (CAS) of the Department of Communication, is to examine the psychophysiological response of individuals when exposed to communication phenomena.

The discipline of Media Psychology is a well-established line of research in the United States, but innovative in Europe and Spain. As explained by Emma Rodero, promoter of the laboratory in conjunction with Lluís Mas, both UPF lecturers, and Olatz Larrea, of the UIC, “the main contribution of this research is the ability to measure people’s attention, motivation, activation and emotional response when exposed to a media message”.

In this way, for example, it will be possible to know what point of an advertisement aroused the most attention and emotional activation caused by the introduction of a specific feature in the message. The methodology can be applied to different objects of study: audiovisual, sound, graphic or digital, and is compatible with traditional quantitative and qualitative methodologies.

The name of the laboratory is in honour of the professor of psychology at the University of Granada, Jaime Vila, an international reference in the field of psychophysiology, who has donated much of the equipment to get it up and running.

At the beginning of the month, the members of the laboratory were visited by researchers from the Danish Broadcasting Corporation with the aim of exploring ways for the two institutions to collaborate.