Communication Research

Advice is a vital form of interpersonal influence, and some advice concerns advising others (i.e., meta-advice). In today’s competitive information environment, individuals often encounter both recommendations that support their stance and those that challenge it. Drawing on psychological reactance and normative influence theories, this study examines how people respond to position-disconfirming meta-advice when it is presented in different message contexts—either paired with another position-disconfirming message (consistent) or with a position-confirming message (conflicting). In an experiment, U.S. participants who were either pro- or anti-advising others to get vaccinated received position-disconfirming meta-advice under consistent or conflicting conditions. Results revealed two countervailing effects: pairing position-disconfirming with position-confirming meta-advice mitigated reactance, leading to more favorable responses to the position-disconfirming message, but it also lowered perceived norms, which in turn undermined favorable responses. These findings illuminate how context shapes responses to position-disconfirming meta-advice, with theoretical and practical implications for interpersonal influence in multi-message environments.

One appealing explanation for the dismal state of digital politics in the U.S. is that social media offer abundant threats to users’ political identities. This paper provides a theoretical and empirical foundation for studying political identity threats on social media. A pilot study (N = 931) established that individuals can recognize both realistic and symbolic threats when they explicitly appear in TikTok videos, but that, (a) threat types are not as discrete as theory suggests and (b) sensitivity to symbolic threat depends on strength of partisan identity. A second, pre-registered experimental study (N = 1,279) found that the presence of explicit threats to political ingroups/outgroups influenced emotions and willingness to engage politically on social media. These effects were mediated by threat recognition and often larger for those with stronger partisan identities. This research sets an agenda for studying the presence and effects of explicitly identity-threatening social media content.

This experiment tests the communicative ecology model of successful aging (CEMSA) to determine how viewing positive aging TikTok videos impacts aging outcomes for young (n = 306), middle-aged (n = 225), and older (n = 233) women. We also extend the CEMSA to include ageism and positive attitudes toward older adults. Watching positive aging TikTok videos had an indirect effect on aging efficacy through positive aging affect for all age groups. There was also a positive indirect effect on successful aging through positive affect and aging efficacy for middle-aged and older women. For all three age groups, viewing positive aging TikTok videos increased positive attitude toward older adults through positive affect about aging. Watching positive aging videos was not associated with aging uncertainty in any group. Additional associations and implications for the CEMSA and attitudes toward older adults are discussed.

Political deepfakes potentially undermine democracy by amplifying socio-political divides in hyper-realistic manners. As an important next step in understanding the political consequences of deepfakes, this article reports on the longer-term effects of deepfakes across two different political settings: The US and the Netherlands. We conducted three-wave pre-registered experiments spanning a full week in which we exposed participants in the US and the Netherlands to realistic political deepfakes. We found that, in both political settings, exposure to deepfakes lowered support for the targeted political actor. This effect was strongest for people initially supporting the attacked politician. Although deepfakes had a delegitimizing impact, they were rated as substantially less credible than authentic videos. Although fact-checks were able to lower the credibility of deepfakes, the delegitimizing impact of deepfakes was resilient to corrections. These findings highlight the continued influence of corrected deepfakes on political beliefs.

What constitutes effective supportive message content is a topic of intense interdisciplinary scholarly interest and has palpable real-world implications for individuals’ well-being. Emotion and cognition content are two commonly theorized supportive message forms. Although both are theorized to operate through conversationally induced reappraisal, their relative effects, underlying mediating mechanisms, and boundary conditions for effectiveness are underexplored in experimental research. Three studies (Study 1: N = 852; Study 2: N = 343; Study 3: N = 512) compared the effects of emotion and cognition content, and one tested mediating mechanisms (Study 3). Situational esteem threat was manipulated to examine self-conscious emotion as a moderator. Cognition content was more effective than emotion content when esteem threat was high; differences narrowed when esteem threat was low. Differences were explained, in part, by reappraisal and interpersonal perceptions. Findings suggest message effects depend on degree of esteem threat, and content impacts outcomes via different routes.

The reciprocal associations between social media use, political expression, and political participation are central to communication scholars. The cross-lagged panel model (CLPM) represents a common and widely advocated analytic approach to test these relationships. However, it fails to separate within- from between-person effects. In this paper, we propose a random intercept cross-lagged panel model (RI-CLPM) disaggregating within-person and between-person effects. Using three-wave panel data, we demonstrate positive associations between social media use, political expression and online as well as offline participation consistently across waves using the CLPM. However, these relations could not be observed at the within-person effects level with the RI-CLPM. This suggests that the associations between social media use, political expression and political participation are mainly driven by trait-like differences and not by individual changes over time, fundamentally challenging some of the key conclusions of previous research. Implications for communication scholarship are discussed.

Media agenda setting takes time. However, with the evolving media landscape altering how we consume news, many contemporary agenda-setting studies still rely on decade-old guidelines to determine time lags instead of empirically testing them. The literature also reveals inconsistent conceptualizations of “time lag.” To address this, we propose a two-dimensional typology to clarify this concept and conduct a systematic literature review of 1,444 articles published between 1972 and 2024 to trace conceptual and methodological trends of the time lag research, and identify factors influencing time lag length. Results show that, on average, it took 55 days of media exposure (accumulation) for the agenda-setting effect to appear at the aggregated level and 28 days at the individual level, with public response lagging by about 7 days (delay). Additionally, media agenda setting tends to take longer to manifest at higher levels and occur more quickly in collectivist societies compared to individualist ones.

This study examines how emotional reactions to campaign communication relate to attentional processes and, ultimately, to general interest in a political campaign. Drawing on appraisal theories of emotion and the broaden-and-build theory, we argue that emotional responses to political communication play a central role in shaping different forms of attention and elaboration. Specifically, emotions may foster a narrow attentional focus directed at the stimulus itself or a broader attentional orientation characterized by a willingness to seek additional information. To test these assumptions, we conducted a mobile experience sampling study during the 40 days preceding the 2021 German federal election. Participants repeatedly reported the perceived sentiment of campaign communication, their emotional reactions while encountering it, and their attentional focus toward political information immediately after exposure to campaign communication. Between-person analyses indicate that both negative affect (particularly anger) and positive affect are associated with attentional processes, while happiness is specifically linked to a broadened attentional focus. At the within-person level, both negative and positive emotions predicted momentary attentional focus. Campaign interest, however, was related to (situational) attention rather than to affective processes. We conclude by discussing the role of positivity and positive affect in research on political media effects.

Situated in a creative crowdsourcing challenge organizational community, this research examines how different types of homophily affect network formation among ideators, the challenge innovators. Longitudinal analysis of comment network events among ideators was conducted with relational event models. Status homophily was examined based on ideators’ self-reported public profiles. Findings show that ideators’ location by country significantly influences relational events, but occupational homophily did not. Value homophily was examined based on the content similarity of ideators’ idea submissions. Results indicate that ideator’s choices of platform content categories, those that are designed by the challenge management, significantly influenced ideators’ communication patterns. Specifically, long-term needs were a salient homophily factor among platform categories, whereas short-term needs were heterophilous factors. Finally, a multidimensional homophily measurement using latent class analysis on idea-category-submission patterns predicted the occurrences of communication relational events and achieved an improved model fit compared to modeling all platform categories together.

The death of a parent/partner represents a significant and traumatic transition for surviving families. Guided by relational turbulence theory, this longitudinal and dyadic study examines how relationship characteristics in surviving parent-emerging adult child dyads correspond with communal coping and relational turbulence during bereavement. Data were collected from 45 parent-emerging adult child dyads for 6 weeks. Results highlight relational uncertainty and interdependence as factors that shape cognitive, emotional, and communicative features of coping episodes. Communal coping behaviors, when enacted, emerged as a protective mechanism, helping mitigate relational turbulence. Actor-partner effects demonstrated the interdependent nature of coping and relational turbulence. This study extends relational turbulence theory to parent-child relationships and underscores the importance of communal coping during transitions. Practical implications suggest the need to help families enact coping and manage interdependence during bereavement to mitigate relational turbulence and improve relationship outcomes.

Voters using Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) often struggle with comprehension, leading to satisficing behavior. Conversational Agent VAAs (CAVAAs) aim to improve understanding by allowing users to ask a chatbot comprehension questions. While early research shows positive effects, studies have only compared CAVAAs to basic VAAs, not to enhanced VAAs (VAA+s) with clickable information buttons. Current study compares four versions: a basic VAA, a VAA+, a CAVAA, and a CAVAA+, tested on desktop (Study 1) and smartphone (Study 2). Results show that all three information-rich versions reduce non-directional answers and positively impact political and tool evaluation measures, suggesting that added information, regardless of format, improves response quality and user experience. Interestingly, users request more information in the enhanced web-based VAA+ than via the chatbot. We discuss these and other findings in the paper.

In today’s fragmented media landscape, social media influencers (SMIs) have emerged as popular political information sources among young audiences—despite often lacking political expertise. However, we have limited knowledge about factors that predict trust in SMIs’ political content during early and middle adolescence, a critical period during which political attitudes are formed. This study proposes two novel theoretical pathways to explain varying trust perceptions between and within adolescents: a source-centered pathway, focusing on observed SMI-audience interactions and motive attribution, and an audience-centered pathway, emphasizing adolescents’ digital literacy and parental mediation. A three-wave panel survey (N_W3 = 799 parent-child dyads) shows that trust in SMIs’ political information is higher among those adolescents who view SMIs as involved with their audiences and altruistically motivated, and among adolescents with high digital literacy and whose parents engage in active mediation. However, changes in these variables do not predict deviations from adolescents’ usual trust levels.

This study examines the effects of corrective information and self-affirmation on evaluating political claims in two contexts: the Russian invasion of Ukraine and migration to Germany. In a two-wave online experiment in Germany (N = 1,275), participants were randomly assigned to receive corrective information, a self-affirmation task, both, or neither. Using signal detection theory, we distinguish sensitivity to truth (discernment) from response bias (general skepticism or credulity). Exposure to corrective information significantly improved participants’ truth discernment, with stronger effects for those with higher cognitive reflection test scores. At the same time, corrective information was associated with a shift in response bias for the Ukraine topic, indicating an increased tendency to classify statements as false overall. The self-affirmation intervention corrected an initially credulous response bias in the Ukraine topic, bringing evaluations closer to a balanced position around zero, while leaving responses in the migration domain unchanged. Overall, the findings highlight both the benefits and potential side effects of corrective information interventions and illustrate how psychological interventions can impact evaluative thresholds.

Individuals process persuasive campaign messages intra- and interpersonally with the goal of either accurately evaluating the advocacy or defending against it. In an experiment, messages that argued for reducing consumption of sugar-sweetened beverages were presented to regular drinkers (N = 275). They were then forbidden to interact, allowed to interact, or directed to interact by discussion prompts with either a critical or a collective focus. The no-talk condition data showed persuasion whereas unguided talk yielded counter-persuasion (i.e., a boomerang), which was mitigated to an equal degree by the two prompts. Exploration of potential mediating mechanisms revealed that the prompt effects could be attributed to variations in the quantity of on-topic talk, sentence length, cognitive process words, and negations. As all of these findings were strongest among heavy drinkers, the study demonstrated the promise of prompts for promoting campaign-consistent talk and salutary effects among at-risk individuals.

The proliferation of misinformation has stimulated research into games and videos to reduce susceptibility to misinformation via psychological inoculation. This research field applies several recent extensions of inoculation theory in novel ways, posing the question of whether such interventions are indeed producing inoculation effects. We conducted a systematic review (k = 72) to establish the strength of the links between inoculation theory and the outcomes of the tests. We found that the studies did not pose hypotheses relating to the core factors of inoculation theory: threat conferral and counterarguing. Moreover, empirical designs and analyses have introduced confounding factors. Therefore, links between psychological inoculation theory and the tests are weak, and the question of whether the interventions inoculate remains unbroached. We recommend that future research include theoretically relevant variables in improved empirical tests and that researchers exercise caution in interpreting the results of existing studies as representative of psychological inoculation effects.

Organizations pursuing multiple, often competing goals typically struggle to build the resilience needed to sustain such hybridity. Drawing on the hybrid organizing literature, this study examines how organizations’ symbolic emphasis on dual social-business logics (i.e., high logic centrality) in their social media communication predicts their representational ties on social media and the subsequent communication of resilience enactment. Employing a multi-sourced research design, this study analyzed data from an online survey of 260 social enterprises (SEs) in Taiwan, alongside 3 years of their Facebook data during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings showed that the display of high logic centrality on social media predicted the communication of resilience enactment both directly and indirectly through greater engagement in representational ties with other organizations. Moreover, the strength of the indirect relationship varied based on SEs’ perceived logic centrality in their overall operations. The researchers drew theoretical and methodological implications from the key findings.

This study explored trends of diversity in Communication and Media Studies (CMS) between 1974 and 2023 through an automated content analysis of journal publications. An increasing proportion of first-authors from non-WEIRD countries and non-U.S. WEIRD countries was found alongside a declining proportion of U.S.-based scholars (WEIRD refers to “Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic”). The visibility of women first-authors grew markedly to 54% in the 2020s, although still a bit below the benchmark. A growing prevalence of qualitative methods was found relative to quantitative methods and conceptual work. Interestingly, these trends were intertwined. Qualitative studies were more likely to be authored by women, by scholars from non-U.S. WEIRD countries, and based on non-WEIRD populations. Women authorship was less likely among the increasingly visible non-WEIRD and non-U.S. WEIRD first-authors. Furthermore, less diversity—in particular, geographic and methodological diversity (but not gender diversity)—was found in journals with higher impact-factor.

The relationship between trust in the news media and news use has been studied extensively, yet findings remain inconsistent. We argue that a key source of this inconsistency is the conflation of two distinct forms of media distrust: skepticism and cynicism. Additionally, prior research largely relies on self-reported news use, which is prone to bias. To address both issues, we link survey data with web-tracking data from 739 participants during the 2021 German federal election. We show that skeptics and cynics differ in personality traits, political orientations, and news-use motivations, and – crucially – in their actual news consumption behavior. While skepticism is associated with broader and more intense news exposure, cynicism is linked to lower exposure, particularly to established journalistic mainstream media. These results demonstrate that different forms of media distrust are associated with distinct patterns of news exposure, underscoring the importance of conceptual and behavioral precision in media trust research.

This study compared individual and communal coping messages to highly person-centered support in the context of depression management within romantic relationships. The sample included 138 adults who had been diagnosed with depression, and they evaluated messages that were manipulated to vary in coping strategies and person-centeredness. Results showed that communal coping messages led to greater emotional improvement than individual coping and highly person-centered messages through an indirect effect conveyed by increased perceptions of joint efforts between partners. Cognitive reappraisal, relational connectedness, and shared appraisal did not significantly mediate the relationships between message features and emotional improvement. In addition, highly person-centered messages corresponded with more emotional improvement than individual coping messages. The discussion highlights the implications of partners’ coping-oriented versus supportive approaches to depression management.

Relational turbulence theory explains the mechanisms whereby relationship parameters influence partners’ emotion, cognition, and communication during specific episodes. Using dyadic, collaborative interactions, this study tested three understudied claims proposed by the theory to shed light on the antecedents and consequences of emotion during everyday conversations between romantic partners. Seventy-one couples completed a pre-test survey that included measures of relationship parameters, were video-taped participating in two planning discussions (randomly ordered), and completed post-tests after each discussion. The conversations were then evaluated for communication engagement and valence by outside observers. Results point to relationship uncertainty as a predictor of emotion during communication and add nuance to our understanding of how happiness and annoyance associate with communicative valence and engagement during everyday interactions.