Sebastian Scherr
Dados Biográficos
| ID | 110062 |
|---|---|
| NOME | Sebastian Scherr |
| PRENOMES | Sebastian |
| SOBRENOME | Scherr |
| ASSINATURA | SCHERR S |
| AFILIAÇÕES | University of Augsburg |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-4730-1575 |
| VERIFICADO | Sim |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 56 |
| TOTAL DE CITAÇÕES | 66 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 56 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMEIRO ANO DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2012 |
| ANO MAIS RECENTE DE PUBLICAÇÃO | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 4 |
‘Hook’-shaped polarization
Conservative news comment sections are raising concerns about polarization. These sections have become hotbeds for participatory propaganda, as some conservative media outlets employ this strategy to segment, obscure, and amplify propagandistic messages. This study examines how users across the liberal-conservative political spectrum respond to participatory propaganda, with a special focus on top-ranked comment threads featuring content from so-…
What’s the optimal usage pattern? Latent profile analysis of Chinese young adults’ social networking site use and its association with subjective well-being
Contributing to the active debate about how the use of social networking site (SNS) affects mental health, this study uses a person-centered approach to examine the relationship between SNS use and components of subjective well-being. Unlike previous research that primarily employed variable-centered approaches and focused on the active-passive use dichotomy, this study considered a range of SNS activities across different communication contexts …
Trade-offs in mental health support
Mental health support now extends beyond in-person clinicians, search engines, and medical websites to interactive healthcare providers (IHPs), including AI chatbots, telemedicine (i.e., digital clinicians), and online health communities. Two preregistered U.S. studies examined how patient-centered communication (PCC) attributes shape preferences for mental health support. Study 1 (N = 414, U.S. quota sample, fielded August - September 2025) used…
Patient-Centered Communication Preferences in AI-Powered Mental Health Chatbots
Access to mental health information is shifting from static search to conversational AI. Guided by patient-centered communication (PCC), two preregistered U.S. studies identified preferred communication features for interactions with AI chatbots about mental health and how individuals trade them off within feature bundles. Study 1 (N = 414, US quota sample) used a Best–Worst Scaling (BWS) to identify the six most relevant PCC-aligned features for…
Mental health disorders on Netflix
The power of context
In times of diverse media choices, the context in which choices are made can influence news exposure and opinion change. Inspired by the marketing concept of the choice set, we conducted two experiments in the US (N1 = 731; N2 = 396) to examine how choice set size (number of articles presented at a time) and composition (ratio of supportive “pro” to opposing “anti” articles) affect news exposure, attitudes, and intentions. Smaller choice sets wit…
Model-X knockoffs in the replication crisis era
The present study addresses problems faced by data-driven social science caused by having too much or not enough data. In particular, an abundance of data or a (sudden) lack thereof makes it challenging to identify the most important predictors in a sea of noise using the most parsimonious and reproducible model possible. In this article, we present the model-X knockoff method, which was introduced by Candès et al. (2018) for reducing the false i…
Explaining the use of AI chatbots as context alignment
Drawing from the affordances concept in communication and the advertising research principle of context alignment, this study develops a typology of affordances associated with AI chatbot use across diverse contexts and cultures. We argue that the congruence between perceived affordances and the context of use significantly shapes users’ expectations and engagement with AI chatbots. As a first step, we developed a comprehensive set of AI chatbot …
The same, but different
Understanding how the population attributes responsibility for depression is crucial for shaping the treatment of depressed individuals in society and influencing support for health-related policies. International findings suggest that responsibility attributions generally differ between countries and cultures. However, it is unknown whether they also differ between different healthcare systems within individualistic cultures. To address this res…
The development and validation of the extended active-passive social media use scale
Mixed findings regarding the relationship between social media (SM) use and mental health have left the research field at somewhat of a crossroads, with one significant requirement being a comprehensive tool to measure SM use. In an effort to advance relevant research, this study extends the common ‘active-passive model’ of SM use to develop and validate a comprehensive scale. This scale will measure complex SM behaviors, focusing on subtypes of …
News media literacy as a bridge
We address the relationship between negative news media coverage of Islam and antisemitic attitudes among Muslims as an indicator of cognitive Islamist radicalization. Conceptually grounded in Social Identity Theory and the concept of intergroup competitive victimhood, the study investigates the effects of exposure to negative news media coverage of Muslims and Islam on Muslims living in Germany ( N = 96). While exposure to negative news does not…
What motivates information (non-)seeking behaviors about a healthy diet
Previous research on health information seeking has primarily focused on individuals' intentions to seek or avoid information. However, limited empirical evidence exists regarding the actual behavioral patterns of information-seeking and non-seeking. To address this, we conducted a survey experiment manipulating cognitive load with mostly Belgian participants ( N = 359). By integrating self-report and behavioral data, we investigated motivations …
How Do Recommended Elements in Suicide News Coverage Work? An Investigation of the Effect of Responsible Reporting and Readers’ Reflectiveness on Suicide Prevention
To examine the effect of positive elements in suicide reporting guidelines, we assessed how responsible reporting on suicide (RRS) affect cognitive and intentional responses. We also investigated the moderating role of audience reflectiveness in news processing. Here, 308 individuals participated in a single-factor between-subject experiment conducted in South Korea. We manipulated the number of positive RRS features in news articles by adding su…
Little Strokes Fell Big Oaks
This study investigates how far repeated releases of recommendations for responsible reporting on suicide (RRS) are associated with changes in the quality of suicide reporting. A content analysis was conducted on suicide news articles ( N = 606) by the Korean newspapers Hankyoreh Sinmun and Chosun Ilbo in four six-month periods from 2004 to 2019, which covered the periods before and after the releases of three versions of suicide reporting guidel…
How tree canopy cover can reduce urban suicide attempts
Algorithms without frontiers? How language-based algorithmic information disparities for suicide crisis information sustain digital divides over time in 17 countries
This study focuses on the changes in the global digital divide produced by language-based, algorithmic information disparities in relation to crisis-prevention resources for suicide available through the Google search engine. We used agent-based testing to emulate Google searches performed in 17 countries and in 16 different languages as a direct replication and extension of previous work. We compare data collected in 2017 with data collected in …
International students’ psychosocial well-being and social media use at the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic
Impressions matter more than privacy
Though socially anxious individuals tend to seek safety, little is known about whether this relationship depends on context, including the affordances of social networking sites (SNSs) to provide anonymity and publicness, and whether safety-seeking can be explained by impression management, privacy calculus or both. Based on the psychobiological model of social anxiety, we conducted two studies (Study 1: N = 103, Study 2: N = 1,184) to examine th…
Covid-19, the media, and communication scholarship
جمال_خاشقجي# #JamalKhashoggi
In 2018, Jamal Khashoggi, a Saudi journalist who wrote for the Washington Post, was last seen alive entering the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul. Confirmed news of his murder ignited a heated and polarized public debate on Twitter. We use agenda melding as a theoretical lemma and argue that Twitter sentiment flourishes within multilingual, ad hoc public spheres contributing to an emotional agenda. We examined the Twitter sentiment from 2018 to 2021 b…
Family involvement in medical decision making in Europe and the United States
Verbal and Visual Framing of Responsibility for Type 1 Diabetes by Patient Influencers on Instagram
Visuals remain understudied in health-related framing research. On Instagram, users who have been patients of long-term health conditions, such as type 1 diabetes (T1D), and who regularly share their experiences with a wider audience, that is, patient influencers, have become an increasingly important source of health information. Both their verbal and visual portrayal of health issues and how they frame causal and treatment responsibility for th…
Explaining the success of social media with gratification niches
Suicidal Ideation During the Covid-19 Pandemic
This study examines the role of general news media consumption during COVID-19 in aggravating mental health and suicide risk in the US population. In a sample of U.S. adults ( N = 5,010), we investigated how mental health, COVID-19 health beliefs, and general news consumption influenced the odds of suicidal ideation using hierarchical logistic regression models. Both worsening mental health overall and specifically in regard to COVID-19 increased…
Dance the Night Away
TikTok is one of the most popular apps. TikTok's endless stream of content, the lack time stamps or notifications of ever being “all caught up,” and concealing the phone's clock make it easy to lose track of time on TikTok. However, there is a lack of knowledge about how TikTok use may therefore interfere with our circadian rhythms, particularly our sleep hygiene. By focusing on pre-sleep cognitive arousal, this study aimed to close this knowledg…
Investigating harmful and helpful effects of watching season 2 of 13 Reasons Why
Covid-19 pandemic, government responses, and public mental health
Effects of exposure to self-harm on social media
Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth, and media depictions of suicidal behavior can be a contributing risk factor. Of interest, Instagram recently received more scholarly attention due to its large number of publicly available, explicit, and graphic depictions of self-harm. Importantly, researchers have hypothesized that exposure to this content could be a risk for self-harm and suicide in vulnerable audiences. We tested this hypothesi…
The Meaning of Leaning
Based on the subset of a representative survey of journalists with an active role perception in Germany, this article shows that more liberal journalists within the subset have (a) a more active role conception than more conservative journalists, (b) they perceive stronger discrepancies between their active role and its fulfillment, and (c) they are, thus, less satisfied with audiences and editorial policy. The indirect effect of the political le…
Investigating Google's suicide-prevention efforts in celebrity suicides using agent-based testing
Should the Media Be More or Less Powerful in Politics? Individual and Contextual Explanations for Politicians and Journalists
© 2018, Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. The normative question regarding whether the media should have more or less impact on politics, as viewed by politicians and journalists, is important assuming that norms about media influences can influence behaviors. The present study is the first that combines individual and structural factors that explain political actors’ and journalists’ normative views on the media’s influence on politi…
Equal access to online information? Google’s suicide-prevention disparities may amplify a global digital divide
Worldwide, people profit from equally accessible online health information via search engines. Therefore, equal access to health information is a global imperative. We studied one specific scenario, in which Google functions as a gatekeeper when people seek suicide-related information using both helpful and harmful suicide-related search terms. To help prevent suicides, Google implemented a “suicide-prevention result” (SPR) at the very top of suc…
Searching for Watchdogs
Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that journalists’ role orientations (i.e., their attitudes, values) are reflected in the news (i.e., their role performance). Methodologically, such studies either ask journalists whether they perceive their own professional role in accordance with common conceptualizations (e.g., being a watchdog), or they search for journalistic roles in the news through content analyses, or apply combined approaches. How…
Using Open-Source Tools to Measure Online Selective Exposure in Naturalistic Settings
Measuring audiences’ selective exposure to media content in naturalistic settings constitutes a methodological challenge that has only partly been resolved. We present a new methodological approach that is based on the open-source web analytics software Piwik. This method allows for the tracking of selective exposure and facilitates the integration of selective exposure data with online survey data. To ease data handling, we created a plug-in tur…
Detecting Intentional Self-Harm on Instagram
Self-injurious behavior is often practiced in secrecy or involves body parts that are easy to hide, making early detection difficult and hampering intervention and treatment. However, cutting, one of the most common intentional forms of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), is relatively often shared publicly via new digital media technologies. We explored NSSI on Instagram through a pioneering combination of two computational methods: First, we develo…
The role of language in suicide reporting
News media literacy as a bridge
We address the relationship between negative news media coverage of Islam and antisemitic attitudes among Muslims as an indicator of cognitive Islamist radicalization. Conceptually grounded in Social Identity Theory and the concept of intergroup competitive victimhood, the study investigates the effects of exposure to negative news media coverage of Muslims and Islam on Muslims living in Germany ( N = 96). While exposure to negative news does not…
Family involvement in medical decision making in Europe and the United States
The news expectation predicament
News about right-wing extremism pertains to the media’s information and watchdog functions in democratic societies. Since audience orientation is important to the journalistic profession, it is important to know what different news audiences expect of journalists regarding their professional role and their reporting practices when it comes to media coverage of right-wing extremism. To bridge this research gap, by employing a quota sample represen…
Automatically Identifying Relevant Variables for Linear Regression with the Lasso Method
The abundance of available digital big data has created new challenges in identifying relevant variables for regression models. One statistical problem that gained relevance in the era of big data is high-dimensional statistical inference, when the number of variables greatly exceeds the number of observations. Typically, prediction errors in linear regression skyrocket when the number of included variables gets close to the number of observation…
Increasing Adherence to Media Guidelines on Responsible Reporting on Suicide
Responsible reporting on suicide (RRS) is a cornerstone of suicide prevention. Scholars have developed media guidelines facilitating RRS, but there are barriers to accepting and implementing these suggestions, alongside obstacles for journalists’ comprehensive adherence to them. For example, journalists could perceive media guidelines as a threat to their autonomy or to the freedom of the press. However, there is scant evidence on how journalists…
Parents, Television, and Children's Emotional Expressions
Parents and media both play an important role in the socialization of children's emotions, yet it remains unclear whether these socializing influences vary by culture. We studied the joint influences of parents and television on children's expression of four basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) using self-report survey data from 3570 six- to 15-year-olds from 13 Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and South American countries. Percei…
Dynamic Success on YouTube
Since the 2008 Obama victory, mass media and academic research have contributed to the widespread notion that modern political campaigns are won in the so-called 'web 2.0', more precisely on YouTube. While respective studies were able to identify some major factors for the success of political YouTube videos, some videos 'failed' to have the presumed success online. This lack of clarity has not been convincingly explained by cross-sectional desig…
Der Einfluss politischer Einstellungen auf Rollenverständnis und Arbeitszufriedenheit von Journalisten
The relevance of the political leaning of journalists has been intensively discussed in journalism research. The present article seeks out to contribute substantial new perspectives to this discussion by asking for the relevance of the political leaning of German journalists for their role perceptions and job satisfaction. Therefore, a secondary data analysis of the most recent representative survey (n=1536) of German journalists (Weischenberg et…
Hard and soft news
Over 30 years, a large body of research on what is often called ‘hard’ and ‘soft news’ has accumulated in communication studies. However, there is no consensus about what hard and soft news exactly is, or how it should be defined or measured. Moreover, the concept has not been clearly differentiated from or systematically related to concepts addressing very similar phenomena – tabloidization and ‘infotainment’. Consequently, the results of variou…
Der Einfluss politischer Einstellungen auf Rollenverständnis und Arbeitszufriedenheit von Journalisten
The relevance of the political leaning of journalists has been intensively discussed in journalism research. The present article seeks out to contribute substantial new perspectives to this discussion by asking for the relevance of the political leaning of German journalists for their role perceptions and job satisfaction. Therefore, a secondary data analysis of the most recent representative survey (n=1536) of German journalists (Weischenberg et…
Depression - Medien - Suizid
Depression – Medien – Suizid
Dynamic Success on YouTube
Since the 2008 Obama victory, mass media and academic research have contributed to the widespread notion that modern political campaigns are won in the so-called 'web 2.0', more precisely on YouTube. While respective studies were able to identify some major factors for the success of political YouTube videos, some videos 'failed' to have the presumed success online. This lack of clarity has not been convincingly explained by cross-sectional desig…
The Meaning of Leaning
Based on the subset of a representative survey of journalists with an active role perception in Germany, this article shows that more liberal journalists within the subset have (a) a more active role conception than more conservative journalists, (b) they perceive stronger discrepancies between their active role and its fulfillment, and (c) they are, thus, less satisfied with audiences and editorial policy. The indirect effect of the political le…
Depression – Medien – Suizid
More Than Shoot-Em-Up and Torture Porn
Media violence research has mainly focused on aggression effects so far. But are audiences' thoughts about violent portrayals actually confined to aggressive fantasies? This study examines more complex thought processes about violent portrayals that involve reflection, meaning-making, and truth-seeking about violence as a fact of social reality. We conducted qualitative in-depth interviews with 39 participants from different backgrounds, includin…
Extended Abstract
Over the last decades, mental disorders continued to substantially contribute to the global burden of disease The point prevalence of depressive disorders in the German population aged 18 to 65 is estimated to be around 3 million people. Moreover, almost 80 percent of the German general population aged over 14 years regularly access the internet and 46 percent of them have an account on at least one Social Networking Site (SNS) These people regul…
Facebook-Nutzung in Abhängigkeit depressiver Tendenzen
Die Studie untersucht den Einfluss depressiver Tendenzen auf die Facebook-Nutzungsdauer unter Berücksichtigung moderierender Effekte von zentralen Persön
Using Open-Source Tools to Measure Online Selective Exposure in Naturalistic Settings
Measuring audiences’ selective exposure to media content in naturalistic settings constitutes a methodological challenge that has only partly been resolved. We present a new methodological approach that is based on the open-source web analytics software Piwik. This method allows for the tracking of selective exposure and facilitates the integration of selective exposure data with online survey data. To ease data handling, we created a plug-in tur…
How Perceived Persuasive Intent and Reactance Contribute to Third-Person Perceptions
In two experiments, this study presents a process model that explains third-person perceptions (TPP) as a function of perceived persuasive intent and reactance. Using two nonstudent samples, findings were internally replicated for two topics. The study shows that media messages evoking perceptions of persuasive intent also activate reactance, which in turn predicts TPP topic-independently. Remarkably, half of the total stimulus effect on TPP coul…
Differential Influences of Depression and Personality Traits on the Use of Facebook
Depressive symptoms are highly prevalent among younger populations and have been clearly associated with lowered activity in general. Focusing on Facebook use as an extremely popular leisure activity, this study examines the influence of depressive tendencies on the intensity of using Facebook by considering the moderating effects of relevant personality traits and different motivations associated with social network site (SNS) use. Based on an o…
Inspired by the Paralympics
Theories of eudaimonic entertainment and destigmatization concur to suggest that empathic feelings elicited by portrayals of Paralympic athletes can increase audience interest in para-sports and can lead to prosocial attitude change toward persons with disabilities in general. Three experiments were conducted to examine this dual, mutually reinforcing function of empathy in promoting public awareness and destigmatization. Participants watched tel…
On the relevance of parents and TV as socializers of 6–19 year-olds’ expressions of emotion
This study examines joint influences of parental socialization and socialization via mass media on children’s expression of emotions. The effect of parental approval of their child’s expression of emotions, on the child’s approval of TV characters expressing the emotion, and the influence of both on the child’s expression of emotions within the past seven days is tested for the emotions fear, sadness, anger, and happiness with a representative su…
Equal access to online information? Google’s suicide-prevention disparities may amplify a global digital divide
Worldwide, people profit from equally accessible online health information via search engines. Therefore, equal access to health information is a global imperative. We studied one specific scenario, in which Google functions as a gatekeeper when people seek suicide-related information using both helpful and harmful suicide-related search terms. To help prevent suicides, Google implemented a “suicide-prevention result” (SPR) at the very top of suc…
Searching for Watchdogs
Empirical studies have repeatedly shown that journalists’ role orientations (i.e., their attitudes, values) are reflected in the news (i.e., their role performance). Methodologically, such studies either ask journalists whether they perceive their own professional role in accordance with common conceptualizations (e.g., being a watchdog), or they search for journalistic roles in the news through content analyses, or apply combined approaches. How…
The role of language in suicide reporting
Automatically Identifying Relevant Variables for Linear Regression with the Lasso Method
The abundance of available digital big data has created new challenges in identifying relevant variables for regression models. One statistical problem that gained relevance in the era of big data is high-dimensional statistical inference, when the number of variables greatly exceeds the number of observations. Typically, prediction errors in linear regression skyrocket when the number of included variables gets close to the number of observation…
Increasing Adherence to Media Guidelines on Responsible Reporting on Suicide
Responsible reporting on suicide (RRS) is a cornerstone of suicide prevention. Scholars have developed media guidelines facilitating RRS, but there are barriers to accepting and implementing these suggestions, alongside obstacles for journalists’ comprehensive adherence to them. For example, journalists could perceive media guidelines as a threat to their autonomy or to the freedom of the press. However, there is scant evidence on how journalists…
Effects of exposure to self-harm on social media
Suicide is a leading cause of death among youth, and media depictions of suicidal behavior can be a contributing risk factor. Of interest, Instagram recently received more scholarly attention due to its large number of publicly available, explicit, and graphic depictions of self-harm. Importantly, researchers have hypothesized that exposure to this content could be a risk for self-harm and suicide in vulnerable audiences. We tested this hypothesi…
Detecting Intentional Self-Harm on Instagram
Self-injurious behavior is often practiced in secrecy or involves body parts that are easy to hide, making early detection difficult and hampering intervention and treatment. However, cutting, one of the most common intentional forms of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), is relatively often shared publicly via new digital media technologies. We explored NSSI on Instagram through a pioneering combination of two computational methods: First, we develo…
Investigating harmful and helpful effects of watching season 2 of 13 Reasons Why
Should the Media Be More or Less Powerful in Politics? Individual and Contextual Explanations for Politicians and Journalists
© 2018, Copyright © 2018 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC. The normative question regarding whether the media should have more or less impact on politics, as viewed by politicians and journalists, is important assuming that norms about media influences can influence behaviors. The present study is the first that combines individual and structural factors that explain political actors’ and journalists’ normative views on the media’s influence on politi…
Parents, Television, and Children's Emotional Expressions
Parents and media both play an important role in the socialization of children's emotions, yet it remains unclear whether these socializing influences vary by culture. We studied the joint influences of parents and television on children's expression of four basic emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, and fear) using self-report survey data from 3570 six- to 15-year-olds from 13 Asian, European, Middle Eastern, and South American countries. Percei…
Psychology (29 obras) · Sociology (20 obras) · Social Psychology (19 obras) · Political science (17 obras) · Computer Science (15 obras) · Medicine (15 obras) · Impact of Technology on Adolescents (12 obras) · Social Psychology (12 obras) · Social Media and Politics (11 obras) · Media Influence and Health (10 obras)