Renita Coleman
Biographic Data
| ID | 4258007 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Renita Coleman |
| GIVEN NAMES | Renita |
| FAMILY NAME | Coleman |
| SIGNATURE | COLEMAN R |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Texas at Austin |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-0078-3327 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 29 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 158 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 29 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1997 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Adapt and overcome: The impact of adaptive frames in news stories on climate change skeptics and acceptors
This experiment test the effects of framing of climate change and finds that news stories that do not discuss the man-made cause of climate change, and do not use trigger words such as “global warming” and “climate change” are significantly better at overcoming climate skeptics’ resistance to them, leading them to agree with the story’s perspective and feel optimistic about a community’s efforts to deal with climate impacts. This process is media…
The Power of Visual Framing in the Age of AI
This invited forum explores the complexity and power of visual framing in the field of journalism and mass communication. The forum brings together leading visual communication scholars who offer insights into how images continue to shape meaning and audience interpretations in an artificial intelligence (AI)-driven social media landscape. Contributions discuss framing as a constructive act of power, the interpretive agency of audiences, the inte…
“I’ll Change My Beliefs When I See It”: Video Fact Checks Outperform Text Fact Checks in Correcting Misperceptions Among Those Holding False or Uncertain Pre-Existing Beliefs
Widespread concerns about the pervasiveness of misinformation have propelled one antidote to the center of scholarly attention: the journalistic fact check. Yet, fact checks often do not work as intended. While most fact checks are text only, a compelling theoretical argument can be made for using a video format instead. In this pre-registered experiment conducted in Germany ( N = 1,093), we investigated whether using video versus text can improv…
But Is That Mediator Really the Cause? An Experiment Manipulating Persuasion Knowledge as a Mediator for How Adaptive Frames Create Positive Responses to Climate Change News
Most mediation studies do not provide evidence that mediators are causal, only correlational. This is one of the first in the field to use concurrent double randomization to test causality of a mediator. Previous research showed adaptive frames that do not trigger skeptics’ anti-climate change schemas improve responses to stories and identified the activation of persuasion knowledge as the mediator. In this experiment, persuasion knowledge activa…
Watching a Show versus Being There: Embodied Gatekeeping and Visual Perspective in Congress
Solutions-oriented Framing and Responsibility Attribution in Urban Youth Crime: Effects on Policy Support and the Mediating Role of Emotions and Social Inequality Perception
The Washington, D.C. mayor's November 2023 declaration of youth violence as a public emergency has sparked growing public concerns and intensified media attention. In 2025, President Donald Trump called to “fight crime in D.C.,” further drawing attention to the issue. This study aims to explore the role of solutions-oriented news framing and its “reason-giving” function in shaping effective policy efforts to curb urban youth crime. It examines ho…
Stereotypes in media representations of boy bands and their fans
Boy bands have long been disparaged in music journalism, in part because of their association with teenage and prepubescent girls who are their primary fans. This study uses media stereotypes of musicians and their fans to see how the interplay of age and gender among these two constituencies is associated with negative stereotyping in music journalism. This study fills a gap in scholarship with a quantitative comparison of how modern boy bands a…
“There Was Blood Coming Out of Her Eyes . . .”: Emotional-Affective Agenda Setting and Disgust in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
This study tracks the affective agendas in the media’s portrayals of the nonverbal behavior of the 2016 presidential candidates, and then shows how these media portrayals are related to voters’ emotional valence. It also gauges the relationship of disgust to voting intention, comparing it with anger, fear, hope, and pride, as well as other established demographic predictors and party affiliation. Findings show that valence-based emotions as conve…
Reaching Science Skeptics: How Adaptive Framing of Climate Change Leads to Positive Responses Via Persuasion Knowledge and Perceived Behavioral Control
This study extends framing theory by identifying two causal mechanisms and one contingent condition for a new type of frame to be used with issues where people dispute scientific claims. This new “adaptive frame” focuses on adapting to climate change impacts without cueing deeply held beliefs by discussing causes. An experiment shows this frame works by reducing persuasion knowledge and increasing perceived behavioral control, resulting in scienc…
Seeing “Us” and “Them”: How Political Symbols Polarize Through Anger, Anxiety, and Enthusiasm
This study investigated how political symbols influence affective polarization through emotions. Integrating research on visual communication, social identity theory, and the affective contagion hypothesis, we theorized that partisan symbols compared to national symbols would exacerbate affective polarization—and that anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm mediate this process. An experiment (N = 1,013) found the expected emotional impact and mediation e…
Facing the music: Stereotyping of and by women in US music journalism
This study updates and expands the application of stereotyping and professional socialization to music journalism in a way that is generalizable to the United States music journalism industry, and seeks to understand the role women journalists play in counteracting or perpetuating stereotyping of women musicians. A content analysis of 936 articles finds significant stereotyping of women musicians in major US music publications during 2016. The st…
Individual differences in affective agenda setting: A cross-sectional analysis of three U.S. presidential elections
Much is known about how individual differences such as age and education affect the news media’s ability to transfer its agenda of issues to the public, but little is known about them at the affective level of agenda setting. Evidence shows individual differences may work differently with affect, thus this study examined demographics that predict adopting the news media’s affective agenda. Using data from the U.S. Presidential campaigns in 2008, …
We’re more ethical than they are: Third-person and first-person perceptions of the ethical climate of American journalists
This study advances our understanding of mainstream US journalists’ perceptions of their industry’s ethical climate by extending first- and third-person perception to this domain. These journalists believe that colleagues in their same organization act unethically significantly less often and act ethically significantly more often than those at other organizations and in related industries. The first- and third-person perceptions are a linear fun…
Why be a journalist? US students’ motivations and role conceptions in the new age of journalism
This mixed-methods study using a national, random sample of journalism students explores their motivations for majoring in journalism and conceptions of the roles of journalists. It showed many similarities among students today and yesterday and some differences between students and professionals. Students’ ranking of the importance of roles compared to professionals showed no significant correlation. They still recognize the same four main roles…
Topical Punch: Health Topics as Drivers of Idiosyncratic Reader Responses to Online News
Although scholars explore how news stories’ framing elements may affect reader responses, they have yet to examine how the topics of health-related articles affect those responses. By content analyzing three US newspapers’ online health content and reader comments, this study finds that certain health topics are idiosyncratic with reader responses. Readers reacted to personal health and obesity news with more episodic and gain-framed comments but…
Testing Generational, Life Cycle, and Period Effects of Age on Agenda Setting
This study explores the relationship between age and the media's agenda-setting effects both by cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. Using American National Election Studies surveys and the New York Times Index data from 1960 to 2004, we test three possible effects of age on the agenda-setting process: generational, life-cycle, and period effects. Findings show the public agenda is fairly stable across generations and age cohorts despite in…
Testing the Effect of Framing and Sourcing in Health News Stories
This study examines whether changing the way news stories report on health can induce shifts in readers' perceptions of problems of obesity, diabetes, immigrant health, and smoking. The authors manipulated two variables in a controlled experiment: the quality of sourcing-the number of sources and their expertise-and the framing-changing from an episodic, traditional frame to a thematic frame that incorporated information on context, risk factors,…
The Moral Judgment of Minority Journalists: Evidence From Asian American, Black, and Hispanic Professional Journalists
This study used three controlled experiments to investigate the effects of a story subject's race on the moral judgment of Asian American, Hispanic, and Black professional journalists by changing only the race of the news subjects in photographs. Contrary to what in-group and identification theories would predict, minority journalists did not show preference to story subjects of their own race, nor did they show bias toward story subjects of othe…
Journalists' Moral Judgment About Children: Do as I say, not as I do?
This study used a controlled experiment to examine the ethical decision-making of 99 professional journalists in the United States to see if they held different attitudes, made different decisions, and used different levels of moral judgment when stories involved children than when they involved adults. It found that these journalists were significantly more concerned with protecting children's privacy, keeping them from harm, and ensuring inform…
Proposing Emotion as a Dimension of Affective Agenda Setting: Separating Affect into Two Components and Comparing Their Second-Level Effects
This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include emotion as affect and seeks to understand its valence. Three important findings emerged; first, the media's emotional-affective agenda corresponds with the public's emotional impressions of candidates; second, negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions even when the topic is not a negative “problem”; and third, agenda-setting effects are greater on the audienc…
Advancing Agenda-Setting Theory: The Comparative Strength and New Contingent Conditions of the Two Levels of Agenda-Setting Effects
Survey and content analysis data from the 2004 presidential election were used to examine relative strength of first- and second-level agenda setting. Second-level candidate attributes exert a stronger agenda-setting influence on the public than does the salience of issues. More striking is the difference in effect sizes on voting intention. Respondents' perception of candidates' traits has a stronger agenda-setting effect and is a better predict…
Public life and the internet: If you build a better website, will citizens become engaged
This study links uses and gratifications theory to a theory that addresses civic engagement and then applies it to create an electronic public sphere designed to encourage citizens to participate in civic life. An experimental website on the topic of the state budget was created and tested to assure maximum usability by citizens. It found that the site designed to conform to users' wants and needs in content, navigation and appearance did indeed …
An Enabling Environment: A reconsideration of the press and the Spanish–American War
This study of the media's influence on the Spanish–American War revises the revisionists through quantitative research. In this, the first study to accept Caudill's challenge to reconstruct historical public opinion through agenda-setting research, we do not find the yellow press started the war—as has been previously theorized and disproved—but we do find that sensational and conservative newspapers together created an enabling environment for g…
Network TV News' Affective Framing of the Presidential Candidates: Evidence for a Second-Level Agenda-Setting Effect through Visual Framing
This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include affective framing of candidates conveyed through visual information during the 2000 presidential campaign. Network TV news coverage included nonverbal behavior for Al Gore that was more positive than George Bush's, and those who watched more were significantly more likely to hold attitudes that mirrored the media portrayals
Bullets as bacteria: Television news magazines’ use of the public health model for reporting violence
Surveys of mass media content related to social violence suggest that it generally focuses on the individual, atomistic ‘act’ (e.g. the bang-bang car chase) rather than issues of cause and prevention. Yet, increasingly - but with controversy - doctors, health officials and activists have pushed for a ‘public health’ model of reporting news about crime and violence that looks at interactions between the victim, the agent of injury or death, and th…
Network TV News' Affective Framing of the Presidential Candidates: Evidence for a Second-Level Agenda-Setting Effect through Visual Framing
This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include affective framing of candidates conveyed through visual information during the 2000 presidential campaign. Network TV news coverage included nonverbal behavior for Al Gore that was more positive than George Bush's, and those who watched more were significantly more likely to hold attitudes that mirrored the media portrayals
Advancing Agenda-Setting Theory: The Comparative Strength and New Contingent Conditions of the Two Levels of Agenda-Setting Effects
Survey and content analysis data from the 2004 presidential election were used to examine relative strength of first- and second-level agenda setting. Second-level candidate attributes exert a stronger agenda-setting influence on the public than does the salience of issues. More striking is the difference in effect sizes on voting intention. Respondents' perception of candidates' traits has a stronger agenda-setting effect and is a better predict…
Proposing Emotion as a Dimension of Affective Agenda Setting: Separating Affect into Two Components and Comparing Their Second-Level Effects
This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include emotion as affect and seeks to understand its valence. Three important findings emerged; first, the media's emotional-affective agenda corresponds with the public's emotional impressions of candidates; second, negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions even when the topic is not a negative “problem”; and third, agenda-setting effects are greater on the audienc…
Why be a journalist? US students’ motivations and role conceptions in the new age of journalism
This mixed-methods study using a national, random sample of journalism students explores their motivations for majoring in journalism and conceptions of the roles of journalists. It showed many similarities among students today and yesterday and some differences between students and professionals. Students’ ranking of the importance of roles compared to professionals showed no significant correlation. They still recognize the same four main roles…
Public life and the internet: If you build a better website, will citizens become engaged
This study links uses and gratifications theory to a theory that addresses civic engagement and then applies it to create an electronic public sphere designed to encourage citizens to participate in civic life. An experimental website on the topic of the state budget was created and tested to assure maximum usability by citizens. It found that the site designed to conform to users' wants and needs in content, navigation and appearance did indeed …
Searching for the Ethical Journalist: An Exploratory Study of the Moral Development of News Workers
This study gathered preliminary baseline data on the moral development of journalists using the Defining Issues Test (DIT), an instrument based on Kohlberg's (1969) 6 stages. Results show that a sample of journalists scored 4th highest among professionals tested using the DIT. The journalists ranked behind seminarians/philosophers, medical students, and physicians but above dental students, nurses, graduate students, undergraduate college student…
Topical Punch: Health Topics as Drivers of Idiosyncratic Reader Responses to Online News
Although scholars explore how news stories’ framing elements may affect reader responses, they have yet to examine how the topics of health-related articles affect those responses. By content analyzing three US newspapers’ online health content and reader comments, this study finds that certain health topics are idiosyncratic with reader responses. Readers reacted to personal health and obesity news with more episodic and gain-framed comments but…
The Intellectual Antecedents of Public Journalism
We’re more ethical than they are: Third-person and first-person perceptions of the ethical climate of American journalists
This study advances our understanding of mainstream US journalists’ perceptions of their industry’s ethical climate by extending first- and third-person perception to this domain. These journalists believe that colleagues in their same organization act unethically significantly less often and act ethically significantly more often than those at other organizations and in related industries. The first- and third-person perceptions are a linear fun…
Journalists' Moral Judgment About Children: Do as I say, not as I do?
This study used a controlled experiment to examine the ethical decision-making of 99 professional journalists in the United States to see if they held different attitudes, made different decisions, and used different levels of moral judgment when stories involved children than when they involved adults. It found that these journalists were significantly more concerned with protecting children's privacy, keeping them from harm, and ensuring inform…
Individual differences in affective agenda setting: A cross-sectional analysis of three U.S. presidential elections
Much is known about how individual differences such as age and education affect the news media’s ability to transfer its agenda of issues to the public, but little is known about them at the affective level of agenda setting. Evidence shows individual differences may work differently with affect, thus this study examined demographics that predict adopting the news media’s affective agenda. Using data from the U.S. Presidential campaigns in 2008, …
Bullets as bacteria: Television news magazines’ use of the public health model for reporting violence
Surveys of mass media content related to social violence suggest that it generally focuses on the individual, atomistic ‘act’ (e.g. the bang-bang car chase) rather than issues of cause and prevention. Yet, increasingly - but with controversy - doctors, health officials and activists have pushed for a ‘public health’ model of reporting news about crime and violence that looks at interactions between the victim, the agent of injury or death, and th…
The Moral Judgment of Minority Journalists: Evidence From Asian American, Black, and Hispanic Professional Journalists
This study used three controlled experiments to investigate the effects of a story subject's race on the moral judgment of Asian American, Hispanic, and Black professional journalists by changing only the race of the news subjects in photographs. Contrary to what in-group and identification theories would predict, minority journalists did not show preference to story subjects of their own race, nor did they show bias toward story subjects of othe…
An Enabling Environment: A reconsideration of the press and the Spanish–American War
This study of the media's influence on the Spanish–American War revises the revisionists through quantitative research. In this, the first study to accept Caudill's challenge to reconstruct historical public opinion through agenda-setting research, we do not find the yellow press started the war—as has been previously theorized and disproved—but we do find that sensational and conservative newspapers together created an enabling environment for g…
The Ethical Context for Public Journalism: As an Ethical Foundation for Public Journalism, Communitarian Philosophy Provides Principles for Practitioners to Apply to Real-World Problems
Despite vehement criticism, more than 200 public journalism projects have been undertaken in the past five years. Whether this represents the beginning of a trend or just another passing fad, the sheer number of public journalism projects prompts the question, Why now? One answer may be that the current adoption of public journalism's philosophies is in part due to the concomitant development of communitarian ethics, a philosophy that offers the …
The Intellectual Antecedents of Public Journalism
The Ethical Context for Public Journalism: As an Ethical Foundation for Public Journalism, Communitarian Philosophy Provides Principles for Practitioners to Apply to Real-World Problems
Despite vehement criticism, more than 200 public journalism projects have been undertaken in the past five years. Whether this represents the beginning of a trend or just another passing fad, the sheer number of public journalism projects prompts the question, Why now? One answer may be that the current adoption of public journalism's philosophies is in part due to the concomitant development of communitarian ethics, a philosophy that offers the …
Searching for the Ethical Journalist: An Exploratory Study of the Moral Development of News Workers
This study gathered preliminary baseline data on the moral development of journalists using the Defining Issues Test (DIT), an instrument based on Kohlberg's (1969) 6 stages. Results show that a sample of journalists scored 4th highest among professionals tested using the DIT. The journalists ranked behind seminarians/philosophers, medical students, and physicians but above dental students, nurses, graduate students, undergraduate college student…
Visual Elements in Public Journalism Newspapers in an Election: A Content Analysis of the Photographs and Graphics in Campaign 2000
This content analysis examines the use of visual elements such as photographs and graphic elements in public journalism and traditional newspapers during the general election of 2000. Public journalism newspapers used more graphic elements to convey issues and analysis, common ground and solutions, and to present information that citizens can use to contact the media than did traditional journalism, but it did not translate mobilizing information…
Bullets as bacteria: Television news magazines’ use of the public health model for reporting violence
Surveys of mass media content related to social violence suggest that it generally focuses on the individual, atomistic ‘act’ (e.g. the bang-bang car chase) rather than issues of cause and prevention. Yet, increasingly - but with controversy - doctors, health officials and activists have pushed for a ‘public health’ model of reporting news about crime and violence that looks at interactions between the victim, the agent of injury or death, and th…
An Enabling Environment: A reconsideration of the press and the Spanish–American War
This study of the media's influence on the Spanish–American War revises the revisionists through quantitative research. In this, the first study to accept Caudill's challenge to reconstruct historical public opinion through agenda-setting research, we do not find the yellow press started the war—as has been previously theorized and disproved—but we do find that sensational and conservative newspapers together created an enabling environment for g…
Network TV News' Affective Framing of the Presidential Candidates: Evidence for a Second-Level Agenda-Setting Effect through Visual Framing
This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include affective framing of candidates conveyed through visual information during the 2000 presidential campaign. Network TV news coverage included nonverbal behavior for Al Gore that was more positive than George Bush's, and those who watched more were significantly more likely to hold attitudes that mirrored the media portrayals
Public life and the internet: If you build a better website, will citizens become engaged
This study links uses and gratifications theory to a theory that addresses civic engagement and then applies it to create an electronic public sphere designed to encourage citizens to participate in civic life. An experimental website on the topic of the state budget was created and tested to assure maximum usability by citizens. It found that the site designed to conform to users' wants and needs in content, navigation and appearance did indeed …
Advancing Agenda-Setting Theory: The Comparative Strength and New Contingent Conditions of the Two Levels of Agenda-Setting Effects
Survey and content analysis data from the 2004 presidential election were used to examine relative strength of first- and second-level agenda setting. Second-level candidate attributes exert a stronger agenda-setting influence on the public than does the salience of issues. More striking is the difference in effect sizes on voting intention. Respondents' perception of candidates' traits has a stronger agenda-setting effect and is a better predict…
Journalists' Moral Judgment About Children: Do as I say, not as I do?
This study used a controlled experiment to examine the ethical decision-making of 99 professional journalists in the United States to see if they held different attitudes, made different decisions, and used different levels of moral judgment when stories involved children than when they involved adults. It found that these journalists were significantly more concerned with protecting children's privacy, keeping them from harm, and ensuring inform…
Proposing Emotion as a Dimension of Affective Agenda Setting: Separating Affect into Two Components and Comparing Their Second-Level Effects
This study expands the theory of second-level agenda setting to include emotion as affect and seeks to understand its valence. Three important findings emerged; first, the media's emotional-affective agenda corresponds with the public's emotional impressions of candidates; second, negative emotions are more powerful than positive emotions even when the topic is not a negative “problem”; and third, agenda-setting effects are greater on the audienc…
Testing the Effect of Framing and Sourcing in Health News Stories
This study examines whether changing the way news stories report on health can induce shifts in readers' perceptions of problems of obesity, diabetes, immigrant health, and smoking. The authors manipulated two variables in a controlled experiment: the quality of sourcing-the number of sources and their expertise-and the framing-changing from an episodic, traditional frame to a thematic frame that incorporated information on context, risk factors,…
The Moral Judgment of Minority Journalists: Evidence From Asian American, Black, and Hispanic Professional Journalists
This study used three controlled experiments to investigate the effects of a story subject's race on the moral judgment of Asian American, Hispanic, and Black professional journalists by changing only the race of the news subjects in photographs. Contrary to what in-group and identification theories would predict, minority journalists did not show preference to story subjects of their own race, nor did they show bias toward story subjects of othe…
Testing Generational, Life Cycle, and Period Effects of Age on Agenda Setting
This study explores the relationship between age and the media's agenda-setting effects both by cross-sectional and longitudinal analysis. Using American National Election Studies surveys and the New York Times Index data from 1960 to 2004, we test three possible effects of age on the agenda-setting process: generational, life-cycle, and period effects. Findings show the public agenda is fairly stable across generations and age cohorts despite in…
Topical Punch: Health Topics as Drivers of Idiosyncratic Reader Responses to Online News
Although scholars explore how news stories’ framing elements may affect reader responses, they have yet to examine how the topics of health-related articles affect those responses. By content analyzing three US newspapers’ online health content and reader comments, this study finds that certain health topics are idiosyncratic with reader responses. Readers reacted to personal health and obesity news with more episodic and gain-framed comments but…
Why be a journalist? US students’ motivations and role conceptions in the new age of journalism
This mixed-methods study using a national, random sample of journalism students explores their motivations for majoring in journalism and conceptions of the roles of journalists. It showed many similarities among students today and yesterday and some differences between students and professionals. Students’ ranking of the importance of roles compared to professionals showed no significant correlation. They still recognize the same four main roles…
We’re more ethical than they are: Third-person and first-person perceptions of the ethical climate of American journalists
This study advances our understanding of mainstream US journalists’ perceptions of their industry’s ethical climate by extending first- and third-person perception to this domain. These journalists believe that colleagues in their same organization act unethically significantly less often and act ethically significantly more often than those at other organizations and in related industries. The first- and third-person perceptions are a linear fun…
Individual differences in affective agenda setting: A cross-sectional analysis of three U.S. presidential elections
Much is known about how individual differences such as age and education affect the news media’s ability to transfer its agenda of issues to the public, but little is known about them at the affective level of agenda setting. Evidence shows individual differences may work differently with affect, thus this study examined demographics that predict adopting the news media’s affective agenda. Using data from the U.S. Presidential campaigns in 2008, …
Facing the music: Stereotyping of and by women in US music journalism
This study updates and expands the application of stereotyping and professional socialization to music journalism in a way that is generalizable to the United States music journalism industry, and seeks to understand the role women journalists play in counteracting or perpetuating stereotyping of women musicians. A content analysis of 936 articles finds significant stereotyping of women musicians in major US music publications during 2016. The st…
Stereotypes in media representations of boy bands and their fans
Boy bands have long been disparaged in music journalism, in part because of their association with teenage and prepubescent girls who are their primary fans. This study uses media stereotypes of musicians and their fans to see how the interplay of age and gender among these two constituencies is associated with negative stereotyping in music journalism. This study fills a gap in scholarship with a quantitative comparison of how modern boy bands a…
“There Was Blood Coming Out of Her Eyes . . .”: Emotional-Affective Agenda Setting and Disgust in the 2016 U.S. Presidential Election
This study tracks the affective agendas in the media’s portrayals of the nonverbal behavior of the 2016 presidential candidates, and then shows how these media portrayals are related to voters’ emotional valence. It also gauges the relationship of disgust to voting intention, comparing it with anger, fear, hope, and pride, as well as other established demographic predictors and party affiliation. Findings show that valence-based emotions as conve…
Reaching Science Skeptics: How Adaptive Framing of Climate Change Leads to Positive Responses Via Persuasion Knowledge and Perceived Behavioral Control
This study extends framing theory by identifying two causal mechanisms and one contingent condition for a new type of frame to be used with issues where people dispute scientific claims. This new “adaptive frame” focuses on adapting to climate change impacts without cueing deeply held beliefs by discussing causes. An experiment shows this frame works by reducing persuasion knowledge and increasing perceived behavioral control, resulting in scienc…
Seeing “Us” and “Them”: How Political Symbols Polarize Through Anger, Anxiety, and Enthusiasm
This study investigated how political symbols influence affective polarization through emotions. Integrating research on visual communication, social identity theory, and the affective contagion hypothesis, we theorized that partisan symbols compared to national symbols would exacerbate affective polarization—and that anger, anxiety, and enthusiasm mediate this process. An experiment (N = 1,013) found the expected emotional impact and mediation e…
“I’ll Change My Beliefs When I See It”: Video Fact Checks Outperform Text Fact Checks in Correcting Misperceptions Among Those Holding False or Uncertain Pre-Existing Beliefs
Widespread concerns about the pervasiveness of misinformation have propelled one antidote to the center of scholarly attention: the journalistic fact check. Yet, fact checks often do not work as intended. While most fact checks are text only, a compelling theoretical argument can be made for using a video format instead. In this pre-registered experiment conducted in Germany ( N = 1,093), we investigated whether using video versus text can improv…
But Is That Mediator Really the Cause? An Experiment Manipulating Persuasion Knowledge as a Mediator for How Adaptive Frames Create Positive Responses to Climate Change News
Most mediation studies do not provide evidence that mediators are causal, only correlational. This is one of the first in the field to use concurrent double randomization to test causality of a mediator. Previous research showed adaptive frames that do not trigger skeptics’ anti-climate change schemas improve responses to stories and identified the activation of persuasion knowledge as the mediator. In this experiment, persuasion knowledge activa…
Political science (24 works) · Psychology (21 works) · Sociology (19 works) · Media Studies and Communication (18 works) · Media studies (13 works) · Social Psychology (13 works) · Politics (10 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Law (9 works)