Common sense holds that exposure to media content can be associated with different levels of excitement and arousal. The specific case of a thrilling movie well describes the type of stimuli that come to our mind when using the terms arousal and excitation in everyday language. From a psychological point of view, arousal is conceptualized
The theory of excitation transfer addresses sequential dependencies in emotional reactivity. Specifically, it predicts an enhancement of emotional reactions to immediately present emotion-arousing situations by portions of excitation that are left over from preceding related or unrelated emotion-arousing situations. The theory operationalizes excitation primarily as dominance of sympathetic activity in the autonomic nervous system and