This study examined whether the positive or negative valence of a news story, and the race of the character portrayed in the story, would influence Black or White readers' selection of a story. The study employed selective exposure methodology to unobtrusively measure story selections among Black and White readers as they browsed a news site. The results demonstrated Black newsreaders were more likely to select and read positive and negative stories featuring their racial ingroup, and more likely to select and read negative vis-à-vis positive stories about their outgroup. In contrast, Whites' story preference was not affected by story valence or character race. Theoretical assumptions from social identity, social comparison, and social cognitive theories are used to explain the findings.

The readback/hearback protocol is a radio procedure intended to reduce communication errors in technical industries. It consists of the delivery of an instruction to a receiver, and the readback of that instruction by the receiver to confirm to the sender that it has been heard accurately. It does not, however, ensure that the receiver has understood the instruction. Using 2 samples within electricity transmission control, the present research explored whether the prosodic cues that listeners use to interpret uncertainty are also used to judge whether a receiver is perceived to have understood an instruction. Rising intonation and filled interturn delays were identified as prosodic cues that operators use to identify nonunderstandings. Theoretical and practical implications of the findings are considered.

This paper seeks to historicize Twitter within a longer historical framework of diaries to better understand Twitter and broader communication practices and patterns. Based on a review of historical literature regarding 18th and 19th century diaries, we created a content analysis coding scheme to analyze a random sample of publicly available Twitter messages according to themes in the diaries. Findings suggest commentary and accounting styles are the most popular narrative styles on Twitter. Despite important differences between the historical diaries and Twitter, this analysis reveals long-standing social needs to account, reflect, communicate, and share with others using media of the times.

This approach conceptualizes the hostile media effect (HME) as an intergroup phenomenon. Two empirical studies, one quasi-experimental and one experimental, examine the HME in the context of the abortion debate. Both studies show that ingroup identification and group status qualify the HME. Pro-choice and pro-life group members perceived an identical newspaper article as biased against their own viewpoint only if they considered their ingroup to have a lower status in society than the outgroup. In addition, only group members with a stronger ingroup identification showed a HME, particularly because of self-investment components of ingroup identification. Taken together, the findings confirm the important influence of ingroup status and ingroup identification on the HME.

Building on tenets from transactive memory (TM) theory and expectation states (ES) theory, this study examined how communication styles influenced expertise recognition and perceived influence in intercultural groups of Chinese and American members. Controlling for the impact of actual expertise, we found that confident communication did not affect expertise recognition, but affected perceived influence; task-oriented communication had significant positive impact on both expertise recognition and perceived influence; and finally, talkativeness and dominance did not predict either expertise recognition or perceived influence. These results highlight the importance of shared ES, which people from different cultures may not develop, in expertise recognition and influence inferred from a group interaction, thus, contributing to understanding the role of culture and communication in TM development.

Believability has been proposed as a factor influencing the persuasiveness of narratives. A measure of narrative believability was developed and validated. Study 1 details the construction and evaluation of the Narrative Believability Scale (NBS-12) in terms of internal consistency. Study 2 evaluates the criterion-related and construct validity of the scale. Study 3 tests the predictive validity of the measure for identifying juror verdicts and verdict confidence over and above the influence of other measures, including presentation order, attorney credibility, bias, and transportation. The NBS-12 was found to be a psychometrically robust measure of narrative believability and was able to predict variance in verdicts and verdict confidence. These results have implications for narrative persuasion research and understanding juror decision making.

This study is the first comparative analysis of mediated political personalization in the international arena; its contribution to the research in the field is twofold: (a) through a longitudinal analysis, it shows that media coverage of foreign countries focuses increasingly on state leaders rather than on the countries per se; and (b) it accounts for variations in the level of mediated political personalization between pairs of countries: the greater the distance between a pair of countries, in terms of values, political interests, economic relations, and geographical distance, the more their news coverage of each other focuses on the foreign country's leader at the expense of other political aspects.

Abundant media outlets allow for much diversity of political messages and selective use among citizens. A 2-session online field study examined impacts of attitude consistency, attitude importance, and source credibility on selective exposure to political messages and subsequent attitude accessibility. The first session assessed attitudes and their accessibility. In the second session, participants browsed online search results that featured attitude-consistent and attitude-discrepant messages associated with sources of either high or low credibility; selective reading was tracked. Then attitude accessibility was measured again. Participants spent less time with attitude-discrepant messages compared to attitude-consistent messages; this pattern was particularly pronounced among participants with higher attitude importance. Low importance fostered exposure to high-credibility messages. Exposure to attitude-discrepant, high-credibility messages reduced attitude accessibility.

In this theoretical article, we introduce the Differential Susceptibility to Media Effects Model (DSMM), a new, integrative model to improve our understanding of media effects. The DSMM organizes, integrates, and extends the insights developed in earlier microlevel media-effects theories. It distinguishes 3 types of susceptibility to media effects: dispositional, developmental, and social susceptibility. Using the analogy of a mixing console, the DSMM proposes 3 media response states that mediate media effects: cognitive, emotional, and excitative. The assumptions on which the DSMM is based together explain (a) why some individuals are more highly susceptible to media effects than others, (b) how and why media influence those individuals, and (c) how media effects can be enhanced or counteracted.

The past 2 decades have seen an increasingly intense debate on how the rise of Internet-mediated communication has impacted politics in (semi)authoritarian regimes. Previous works have adopted a wide array of approaches. Yet, to date no major study has investigated how citizens in these regimes are making sense of political messages they encounter online in the new, more fragmented media environments of the Internet age. In an initial attempt to fill this gap, this explorative study juxtaposes how young Russians make sense of a liberal-democratic blog entry and, by contrast, a news broadcast from state-controlled TV. On the basis of the findings from 20 in-depth interviews, the article discusses promising avenues for future audience research in hybrid regimes.

The value placed on open communication is an ideology in U.S. American discourse. It has particular urgency among couples coping with a cardiac event, who are often advised that open communication can enhance recovery, bolster individual coping, and sustain relational satisfaction. Our interpretive analysis of 41 interviews with cardiac patients and partners explored the connection between a widespread ideology of openness and varied ways of enacting it that included apparently contradictory practices. Our findings raise questions about interventions designed to change couples' communication, expand concepts and theories of open communication, and suggest developments in the ideology of openness.

Previous research suggests that the news media's reporting about politics in terms of strategy fosters political cynicism. The question remains, however, what individual and contextual factors facilitate or inhibit this effect. In this study, we draw on a unique multimethod and comparative cross-country design, combining a media content analysis (N = 48,892) with a 2-wave panel survey conducted in 21 countries (N = 22,791) during the 2009 European Parliamentary elections. Our findings show that citizens who are less aware of the election campaign become more cynical. Furthermore, strategy news has an effect on cynicism in countries in which quality of governance is higher. Overall, our study provides the first comprehensive overview over the conditional impact of election news on political cynicism in comparative perspective.

This article analyzes the emergence of nationalist martyr narratives and their dissemination via new media as forces for social mobilization and political change. Situating them in the religio-historical contexts of North Africa, we trace martyr narratives in Tunisia and Egypt back to pre-Islamic periods and compare them to the contemporary stories of Mohamed Bouazizi and Khaled Saeed. This reveals the impact of new media on the region, evident in “virtual reliquaries,” and the role that martyr narratives play as catalysts in social mobilization. The trajectory of the martyr narrative from the traditional religious context to the state-driven concept of civil religion allows for the political dimension of narratives resident within the religious context to surface in the contemporary discursive moment.

In late 2010, Jon Stewart attracted considerable news media attention by organizing the Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear and, later, pressuring lawmakers to pass legislation providing health care to 9/11 responders. The events renewed an interpretive struggle surrounding Stewart in which journalists understood his activity as signaling a shift in his cultural role. Using the concept of boundary maintenance to qualitatively analyze journalists' interpretations, this study connects journalistic discourse surrounding Stewart to questions of epistemic authority, the role of earnestness in public discourse, and the responsibility of discursive agents. These evaluations of Stewart illuminate the contestation of appropriate norms and practices within the mediated public sphere during an era of complex cultural, economic, and technological change.

This study explores causes and consequences of gatekeeping trust, a new media trust construct defined as trust that the news media selects stories based on judgments of the importance of problems. If this form of trust—rooted in a misunderstanding of news story selection practices—is what drives agenda setting effects, these effects can be seen as a miscommunication between the media and the public, and perhaps a correctable one. An experiment manipulating exposure to and expression of media criticism finds gatekeeping trust can be reduced without also affecting more desirable forms of media trust. Gatekeeping trust is also the only media trust construct to positively predict an indicator of agenda cueing and negatively predict an indicator of agenda reasoning.

An experiment investigated emotional reactions to news on policy support. Stimuli were selected from a nationally representative sample of local crime/accident news, and a nationally representative online panel of U.S. adults. Stories were manipulated to mention or not mention the role of alcohol. Anger elicited by stories increased blame of individuals, whereas fear increased consideration of contributing societal factors. Mention of alcohol increased likelihood of different emotional responses dominating—greater anger when alcohol was mentioned and greater fear when not mentioned. Such emotions influence policy support: enforcement of existing laws controlling individual behavior in addition to new laws when anger predominated, and, indirectly, support for new laws changing social context in which alcohol is promoted and sold when fear predominated.

The purpose of this study was to examine the multidimensionality of prosocial behavior in Disney animated films. Characteristics of the target and initiator and context of each prosocial act were also examined. Prosocial behavior was portrayed at a rate of approximately 1 act per minute, rarely occurred in combination with aggression, targets were most prosocial toward friends, and tended to help those similar to themselves. This study views Disney in a more positive light than past studies by highlighting high levels of prosocial behavior, as well as portrayal that may facilitate imitation. This study also used a broad definition of prosocial behavior that provides a more nuanced picture of the nature of prosocial behavior in children's programming.