Lindsay Hahn
Biographic Data
| ID | 226880 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Lindsay Hahn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Lindsay |
| FAMILY NAME | Hahn |
| SIGNATURE | HAHN L |
| AFFILIATIONS | University at Buffalo, State University of New York |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-0039-9782 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 28 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 32 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 28 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
A Scoping Review of Prosocial and Antisocial Media Content and Effects in Narrative Entertainment Research Across Five Decades
Despite the popularity of investigations into prosocial and antisocial media content and effects in entertainment research, the essence and boundary conditions of these terms are not well-demarcated. In a preregistered scoping review, we explored how prosocial and antisocial have been defined in narrative entertainment literature according to a comprehensive scheme of moral values outlined by the model of intuitive-morality and exemplars (MIME). …
A call for the adoption of translational science principles in children’s media effects research
Public panic over media’s effects on children represents an exigent problem for the JOCAM community. In response to JOCAM’s request for comments on the most pressing issues facing children’s media
What can heroes and villains teach young audiences? A research brief investigating the values emphasized in family-rated Walt Disney films
Due to the popularity of Walt Disney Studio films and characters, and the fact that young audiences often emulate their favorite Disney characters’ actions, an understanding of the values depicted by Disney’s popular heroes and villains is warranted. Guided by the model of intuitive motivation and exemplars, and extending previous work investigating broader altruism and egoism in Disney films, we content-analyzed the population of N = 442 family-…
Walking the moral plank: Using virtual reality to investigate moral decision-making under threat
How is decision-making affected when individuals face threats to safety? Guided by the theory of dyadic morality, the limited capacity model of motivated-mediated message processing, and exemplification theory, we investigated how safety threats shaped individuals’ physiological responses and behavioral moral decision-making. Using an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment simulating a moral tradeoff, participants crossed a deep pit and made …
Investigating perceived ingroup harm as an explanatory mechanism for media’s effect on audiences’ support for extreme prejudice
Investigating the Role of Morality in Lone-Actor Terrorist Motivations and Attack Severity
Extending previous work suggesting that group-based extremist violence is morally-motivated, we investigated whether lone-actor terrorists are similarly morally-driven, and if so, whether their moral motivations may predict the severity of their attacks. Examining a database containing details of n = 121 lone-actor terrorist attacks, we applied a coding scheme derived from moral foundations theory to extract the main moral motivation driving each…
Investigating the Moral Justification and Online Engagement Strategies Used by Extremist Right-Wing and Left-Wing TikTok Influencers
TikTok influencers have a wide reach among young adults. The potential for political extremists to exploit this reach by presenting extreme ideals as morally justified underscores the importance of investigating extremist influencers' content in order to understand, and ultimately curtail, their use of social media as a megaphone. Guided by the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we content-analyzed a sample of politically extreme right-wi…
Why we fight: Investigating the moral appeals in terrorist propaganda, their predictors, and their association with attack severity
How do terrorists persuade otherwise decent citizens to join their violent causes? Guided by early mass communication research investigating propaganda’s efficacy and the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we investigated the persuasive moral appeals employed by terrorist organizations known to be successful at recruiting others to their causes. We compiled a database of N = 873 propaganda items created by N = 73 violent terrorist organiz…
Early Adolescents Can Extract Distinct Moral Lessons from Narrative Media Content
Extant research suggests that young audiences often misinterpret narratives’ moral messages, potentially limiting the ability of narratives to serve as effective purveyors of moral lessons. Yet questions remain regarding whether young audiences’ inability to extract moral messages from narratives is due to limitations in their moral comprehension, the types of values emphasized by the stimuli in previous studies, or variance from study to study i…
Investigating Responses to Narrative Cliffhangers Using Affective Disposition Theory
Despite the prevalence of cliffhangers in popular narrative entertainment, little research has attempted to investigate the impact of these purportedly high-suspense, unresolved narrative endings on audience responses. Guided by affective disposition theory (ADT), in two between-subjects experiments (NStudy 1 = 202; NStudy 2 = 273) we investigated the extent to which audiences reported greater suspense, enjoyment, and desires for a future narrati…
Investigating 55 years of mass shooter statements in the United States: A study of perpetrators’ stated motivations and their association with attack severity
Mass shootings are a prevalent and terrible problem in the U.S. As a foundation for communication-focused research into the media-related causes and effects of mass shooters' stated grievances, and guided by the model of intuitive-morality and exemplars (MIME), we content-analyzed N = 178 statements from 119 U.S. perpetrators who committed mass shootings between 1966 and 2021 to identify the motivations they communicated for their attacks. Findin…
US South Asian Youths' Perspectives on the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)
Altruistic and Egoistic Motivations of Male and Female Characters in Common Sense Media Television Programming for Children
Examining the Motivations of Walt Disney Heroes and Villains and Their Association with Audience Appeal and Future Film Production
Guided by the model of intuitive-motivation and exemplars, we content analyzed the population of N = 734 Walt Disney Studio film synopses to determine whether Disney's heroes and villains were motivated by altruistic or egoistic values, and if these values were associated with films' audience ratings, box-office performance, or the future production of similar value-laden films. Results revealed that heroes were most likely to be motivated by alt…
Moral clarity decreases as viewer age increases: A content analysis of the moral values and reinforcement cues depicted in popular U.S. children’s television
Evidence suggests that exposure to narrative media content emphasizing the importance of moral intuitions can increase the extent to which children value those intuitions. This is especially the case when intuition exemplars are accompanied by clear social desirability cues (i.e., moral acts are rewarded/performed by heroes or immoral acts are punished/performed by villains). Less is known about the effects of exposure to ambiguous social desirab…
The Representation of Altruism and Egoism in Children’s Books
Although the social implications of children’s media have been a central public concern for millennia, there has been no systematic attempt to quantify the representation of other- versus self-serving values in children’s literature. A coding scheme based on the model of intuitive motivations and exemplars was applied to examine the representation of altruistic and egoistic motivations in popular children’s books. Echoing previous findings on the…
The Promises and Pitfalls of Inspirational Media: What do We Know, and Where do We Go from Here
This editorial introduces the thematic issue on inspirational media; including its role in the elicitation of meaning and self-transcendence, audience responses to inspirational narratives, and the potential for inspirational media to be used for manipulative purposes. We first set the stage for the thematic issue by describing an organizing framework by Thrash and Elliot (2003) to study inspiration. We then situate the seven articles published i…
Using Virtual Agents and Activity Monitors to Autonomously Track and Assess Self-Determined Physical Activity Among Young Children: A 6-Week Feasibility Field Study
The majority of youth fail to get the recommended amount of physical activity (PA), and there is a precipitous decline in PA among children as they get older. Guided by self-determination theory and social cognitive theory, we designed an interactive, mixed reality PA intervention for 6–10-year-old children. Capitalizing on the features of consumer-grade interactive communication technologies, the intervention features a kiosk-based system that h…
The Impact of Terrorist Attack News on Moral Intuitions
Previous research demonstrated that exposure to news of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France increased the salience of moral intuitions associated with respect for authority and purity in a sample of U.S. participants. The present study attempted to replicate this finding with news of domestic terrorism by examining the effect of exposure to news of the 2017 Las Vegas, Nevada music festival shooting. Approximately three weeks before the La…
Do Morals Featured in Media Content Correspond with Moral Intuitions in Media Users: A Test of the Mime in Two Cultures
The model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) predicts that moral representations in media content can activate related moral intuitions in audiences, and that audience members in turn are influenced by their moral instincts to select content featuring corresponding moral values. This proposition was tested and confirmed in a two-phase study. Content analyses measured the frequency of moral domain representations in top-rated popular TV se…
The Powerful Male Hero: A Content Analysis of Gender Representation in Posters for Children’s Animated Movies
Applying Moral Foundations Theory to Identify Terrorist Group Motivations
Previous research distinguishing terrorist groups has employed categorical schemes that are (1) ideologically broad and ambiguous (e.g., right‐wing versus left‐wing) or (2) focused on single‐issues (e.g., guns, abortion). Broad schemes often fail to clearly distinguish groups’ motivations, and single‐issue schemes provide no coherent theoretical structure for understanding terrorist behavior. To address these limitations, we applied the conceptua…
Using Attribution Theory To Explain The Affective Dispositions Of Tireless Moral Monitors Toward Narrative Characters
Recent literature suggests that affective disposition theory (ADT) has difficulty explaining the appeal of protagonists that sometimes do bad things. We addressed this issue by integrating logic from attribution theory with ADT. Three studies examined whether causal factors identified in attribution theory’s covariation model (consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency) affected internal/external attributions (for a character’s harmful behavior)…
Extracting Latent Moral Information from Text Narratives: Relevance, Challenges, and Solutions
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral content represented in media stimuli with a reliable procedure—has not been systematically studied. In th…
Things we know about media and morality
Extracting Latent Moral Information from Text Narratives: Relevance, Challenges, and Solutions
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral content represented in media stimuli with a reliable procedure—has not been systematically studied. In th…
Applying Moral Foundations Theory to Identify Terrorist Group Motivations
Previous research distinguishing terrorist groups has employed categorical schemes that are (1) ideologically broad and ambiguous (e.g., right‐wing versus left‐wing) or (2) focused on single‐issues (e.g., guns, abortion). Broad schemes often fail to clearly distinguish groups’ motivations, and single‐issue schemes provide no coherent theoretical structure for understanding terrorist behavior. To address these limitations, we applied the conceptua…
The Powerful Male Hero: A Content Analysis of Gender Representation in Posters for Children’s Animated Movies
The effect of moral intuitions on decisions in video game play: The impact of chronic and temporary intuition accessibility
The model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) highlights the central influence of innate moral instincts (or intuitions) in media use. Recent experimental research on the MIME found that moral intuitions that are chronically accessible in video gamers are likely to influence players to uphold related moral principles in the game. This study replicated and extended this research to examine the influence of both chronic and temporary accessi…
The Impact of Terrorist Attack News on Moral Intuitions and Outgroup Prejudice
Using logic suggested by the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we examined the impact of exposure to terrorist attack news coverage on the salience of moral intuitions and prosocial behavioral intentions toward outgroup members. In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to watch news of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks or a control news story. Afterward, we measured the salience of five moral intuitions (sensitivity to care, …
The Thrill Is Gone, but You Might Not Know: Habituation and Generalization of Biophysiological and Self-reported Arousal Responses to Video Games
Past research on consequences of video game play have conflated two distinct psychological mechanisms, habituation and generalization, into a unified process dubbed “desensitization.” The current paper reports the results of two studies, a repeated exposure study and a single exposure study, which examine habituation and generalization of biophysiological and self-reported arousal responses to violent video games. The findings indicate that repea…
Investigating 55 years of mass shooter statements in the United States: A study of perpetrators’ stated motivations and their association with attack severity
Mass shootings are a prevalent and terrible problem in the U.S. As a foundation for communication-focused research into the media-related causes and effects of mass shooters' stated grievances, and guided by the model of intuitive-morality and exemplars (MIME), we content-analyzed N = 178 statements from 119 U.S. perpetrators who committed mass shootings between 1966 and 2021 to identify the motivations they communicated for their attacks. Findin…
Things we know about media and morality
The Thrill Is Gone, but You Might Not Know: Habituation and Generalization of Biophysiological and Self-reported Arousal Responses to Video Games
Past research on consequences of video game play have conflated two distinct psychological mechanisms, habituation and generalization, into a unified process dubbed “desensitization.” The current paper reports the results of two studies, a repeated exposure study and a single exposure study, which examine habituation and generalization of biophysiological and self-reported arousal responses to violent video games. The findings indicate that repea…
The effect of moral intuitions on decisions in video game play: The impact of chronic and temporary intuition accessibility
The model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) highlights the central influence of innate moral instincts (or intuitions) in media use. Recent experimental research on the MIME found that moral intuitions that are chronically accessible in video gamers are likely to influence players to uphold related moral principles in the game. This study replicated and extended this research to examine the influence of both chronic and temporary accessi…
The Impact of Terrorist Attack News on Moral Intuitions and Outgroup Prejudice
Using logic suggested by the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we examined the impact of exposure to terrorist attack news coverage on the salience of moral intuitions and prosocial behavioral intentions toward outgroup members. In an experiment, participants were randomly assigned to watch news of the 2015 Paris terrorist attacks or a control news story. Afterward, we measured the salience of five moral intuitions (sensitivity to care, …
Using Attribution Theory To Explain The Affective Dispositions Of Tireless Moral Monitors Toward Narrative Characters
Recent literature suggests that affective disposition theory (ADT) has difficulty explaining the appeal of protagonists that sometimes do bad things. We addressed this issue by integrating logic from attribution theory with ADT. Three studies examined whether causal factors identified in attribution theory’s covariation model (consensus, distinctiveness, and consistency) affected internal/external attributions (for a character’s harmful behavior)…
Extracting Latent Moral Information from Text Narratives: Relevance, Challenges, and Solutions
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) and the Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) contend that moral judgments are built on a universal set of basic moral intuitions. A large body of research has supported many of MFT’s and the MIME’s central hypotheses. Yet, an important prerequisite of this research—the ability to extract latent moral content represented in media stimuli with a reliable procedure—has not been systematically studied. In th…
Things we know about media and morality
Applying Moral Foundations Theory to Identify Terrorist Group Motivations
Previous research distinguishing terrorist groups has employed categorical schemes that are (1) ideologically broad and ambiguous (e.g., right‐wing versus left‐wing) or (2) focused on single‐issues (e.g., guns, abortion). Broad schemes often fail to clearly distinguish groups’ motivations, and single‐issue schemes provide no coherent theoretical structure for understanding terrorist behavior. To address these limitations, we applied the conceptua…
Using Virtual Agents and Activity Monitors to Autonomously Track and Assess Self-Determined Physical Activity Among Young Children: A 6-Week Feasibility Field Study
The majority of youth fail to get the recommended amount of physical activity (PA), and there is a precipitous decline in PA among children as they get older. Guided by self-determination theory and social cognitive theory, we designed an interactive, mixed reality PA intervention for 6–10-year-old children. Capitalizing on the features of consumer-grade interactive communication technologies, the intervention features a kiosk-based system that h…
The Impact of Terrorist Attack News on Moral Intuitions
Previous research demonstrated that exposure to news of the 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris, France increased the salience of moral intuitions associated with respect for authority and purity in a sample of U.S. participants. The present study attempted to replicate this finding with news of domestic terrorism by examining the effect of exposure to news of the 2017 Las Vegas, Nevada music festival shooting. Approximately three weeks before the La…
Do Morals Featured in Media Content Correspond with Moral Intuitions in Media Users: A Test of the Mime in Two Cultures
The model of intuitive morality and exemplars (MIME) predicts that moral representations in media content can activate related moral intuitions in audiences, and that audience members in turn are influenced by their moral instincts to select content featuring corresponding moral values. This proposition was tested and confirmed in a two-phase study. Content analyses measured the frequency of moral domain representations in top-rated popular TV se…
The Powerful Male Hero: A Content Analysis of Gender Representation in Posters for Children’s Animated Movies
The Representation of Altruism and Egoism in Children’s Books
Although the social implications of children’s media have been a central public concern for millennia, there has been no systematic attempt to quantify the representation of other- versus self-serving values in children’s literature. A coding scheme based on the model of intuitive motivations and exemplars was applied to examine the representation of altruistic and egoistic motivations in popular children’s books. Echoing previous findings on the…
The Promises and Pitfalls of Inspirational Media: What do We Know, and Where do We Go from Here
This editorial introduces the thematic issue on inspirational media; including its role in the elicitation of meaning and self-transcendence, audience responses to inspirational narratives, and the potential for inspirational media to be used for manipulative purposes. We first set the stage for the thematic issue by describing an organizing framework by Thrash and Elliot (2003) to study inspiration. We then situate the seven articles published i…
Examining the Motivations of Walt Disney Heroes and Villains and Their Association with Audience Appeal and Future Film Production
Guided by the model of intuitive-motivation and exemplars, we content analyzed the population of N = 734 Walt Disney Studio film synopses to determine whether Disney's heroes and villains were motivated by altruistic or egoistic values, and if these values were associated with films' audience ratings, box-office performance, or the future production of similar value-laden films. Results revealed that heroes were most likely to be motivated by alt…
Moral clarity decreases as viewer age increases: A content analysis of the moral values and reinforcement cues depicted in popular U.S. children’s television
Evidence suggests that exposure to narrative media content emphasizing the importance of moral intuitions can increase the extent to which children value those intuitions. This is especially the case when intuition exemplars are accompanied by clear social desirability cues (i.e., moral acts are rewarded/performed by heroes or immoral acts are punished/performed by villains). Less is known about the effects of exposure to ambiguous social desirab…
Altruistic and Egoistic Motivations of Male and Female Characters in Common Sense Media Television Programming for Children
Why we fight: Investigating the moral appeals in terrorist propaganda, their predictors, and their association with attack severity
How do terrorists persuade otherwise decent citizens to join their violent causes? Guided by early mass communication research investigating propaganda’s efficacy and the model of intuitive morality and exemplars, we investigated the persuasive moral appeals employed by terrorist organizations known to be successful at recruiting others to their causes. We compiled a database of N = 873 propaganda items created by N = 73 violent terrorist organiz…
Early Adolescents Can Extract Distinct Moral Lessons from Narrative Media Content
Extant research suggests that young audiences often misinterpret narratives’ moral messages, potentially limiting the ability of narratives to serve as effective purveyors of moral lessons. Yet questions remain regarding whether young audiences’ inability to extract moral messages from narratives is due to limitations in their moral comprehension, the types of values emphasized by the stimuli in previous studies, or variance from study to study i…
Investigating Responses to Narrative Cliffhangers Using Affective Disposition Theory
Despite the prevalence of cliffhangers in popular narrative entertainment, little research has attempted to investigate the impact of these purportedly high-suspense, unresolved narrative endings on audience responses. Guided by affective disposition theory (ADT), in two between-subjects experiments (NStudy 1 = 202; NStudy 2 = 273) we investigated the extent to which audiences reported greater suspense, enjoyment, and desires for a future narrati…
Investigating 55 years of mass shooter statements in the United States: A study of perpetrators’ stated motivations and their association with attack severity
Mass shootings are a prevalent and terrible problem in the U.S. As a foundation for communication-focused research into the media-related causes and effects of mass shooters' stated grievances, and guided by the model of intuitive-morality and exemplars (MIME), we content-analyzed N = 178 statements from 119 U.S. perpetrators who committed mass shootings between 1966 and 2021 to identify the motivations they communicated for their attacks. Findin…
US South Asian Youths' Perspectives on the Use of Complementary and Alternative Medicine (CAM)
A Scoping Review of Prosocial and Antisocial Media Content and Effects in Narrative Entertainment Research Across Five Decades
Despite the popularity of investigations into prosocial and antisocial media content and effects in entertainment research, the essence and boundary conditions of these terms are not well-demarcated. In a preregistered scoping review, we explored how prosocial and antisocial have been defined in narrative entertainment literature according to a comprehensive scheme of moral values outlined by the model of intuitive-morality and exemplars (MIME). …
A call for the adoption of translational science principles in children’s media effects research
Public panic over media’s effects on children represents an exigent problem for the JOCAM community. In response to JOCAM’s request for comments on the most pressing issues facing children’s media
What can heroes and villains teach young audiences? A research brief investigating the values emphasized in family-rated Walt Disney films
Due to the popularity of Walt Disney Studio films and characters, and the fact that young audiences often emulate their favorite Disney characters’ actions, an understanding of the values depicted by Disney’s popular heroes and villains is warranted. Guided by the model of intuitive motivation and exemplars, and extending previous work investigating broader altruism and egoism in Disney films, we content-analyzed the population of N = 442 family-…
Walking the moral plank: Using virtual reality to investigate moral decision-making under threat
How is decision-making affected when individuals face threats to safety? Guided by the theory of dyadic morality, the limited capacity model of motivated-mediated message processing, and exemplification theory, we investigated how safety threats shaped individuals’ physiological responses and behavioral moral decision-making. Using an immersive virtual reality (VR) environment simulating a moral tradeoff, participants crossed a deep pit and made …
Psychology (26 works) · Social Psychology (20 works) · Media Influence and Health (15 works) · Sociology (12 works) · Epistemology (10 works) · Morality (10 works) · Political science (9 works) · Social Psychology (9 works) · Law (8 works) · Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment (8 works)