The social influences and media use model (SIMU; Grady et al., 2022) discusses how narratives that reflect a media user’s real-world experience might influence subsequent social encounters. The SIMU considers this relevance as an important social affordance of media content as opposed to media technology (Grady et al., 2022). In this paper, I draw parallels between this conceptualization of a narrative’s social affordances and understandings of affinity within Mood Management Theory (MMT; Zillmann, 1988a, 1988b). MMT holds that content affinity (or disaffinity) to a user’s experience plays an important role in the media selection, as well as its potential to intervene in a user’s mood state. Yet the contribution of content-based affinity (usually referred to as semantic affinity) to mood-based selections and preferences has been both under-defined and under-studied (Reinecke, 2016; Eden, Hahn et al., 2018). Here, I argue that content has both behavioral and semantic components, where behavioral affinity is defined in terms of the actions and behaviors shared between users and content, and semantic affinity in terms of the basic psychological needs and intrinsic motives shared between user and content. This project contributes to communication research by proposing a multi-dimensional definition of content affinity that adds precision to Zillmann’s concept (1988a,1988b), and suggests ways to experimentally test how different forms of affinity affect media selection and preference within and beyond MMT. It also seeks to examine how the appeal of affinity and other social affordances may vary depending on the need states of users. Two experiments test the appeal of various perceived social affordances in different social-need states, including affordances of both media technology (RQ1) and message content (RQ2). Results reveal that social-need states can impact the appeal of different social affordances previously described in CMC research (partially supporting H1). Experiences of ostracism and rejection impacted people’s interest in self-disclosing their media preferences online, showing that ostracized people and rejected people gravitate toward different patterns of self-disclosure after experiencing social need threat. Beyond this, the proposed dimensional approach to content affinity reveals two things. First, behavioral and semantic components of content can be reliably manipulated and examined as independent predictors of narrative appeal. Second, semantic affinity with recent social media experiences (particularly rejection) impacted narrative appeal—but behavioral affinity had no effect on appeal (informing H2). This raises questions about the importance of semantic and behavioral affinity as predictors within mood management theory, and the role of content affinity in media selections based on alternative goals than managing moods, such as vicarious need satisfaction through media use and media-based coping strategies.
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