Communication Research

Parent-child dyads responded to a questionnaire investigating the relative impact of exposure to television violence, family communication patterns, and parents’ moral reasoning on the moral reasoning of children. Because previous research found an effect of exposure to television violence on children’s moral reasoning, this study tested whether children’s perspective taking mediated the link between exposure to television violence and moral reasoning. Results suggest that (a) communication orientation is negatively related and control orientation positively related to children’s exposure to television violence, (b) television violence has a negative effect on children’s moral reasoning, and (c) perspective taking mediates the link between exposure to fantasy violence and children’s moral reasoning about justified violence such that more exposure to fantasy violence leads to less advanced perspective taking that leads to less advanced moral reasoning. Even when the age of the child is controlled, parents’ moral reasoning is unrelated to that of their children.

Scholars of voting behavior have considered party identification, issue positions, and candidate images as key determinants of vote choice. Previous research, however, has not resolved whether the strength of the vote determinants differs across individual voters, depending on patterns of political communication during the course of an election campaign. Research has found both that television news stresses candidates’ character rather than policy issues and that political discussion is usually between people who hold similar political beliefs. Based on previous literature, this study hypothesizes that frequent television news viewers are more likely to rely on their perception of candidate image to make an electoral choice, whereas voters who frequently talk to others about politics are more likely to vote on the basis of party identification. National survey data support these hypotheses. Implications for future political communication effects research are discussed.

The present study addresses the role of the media in the self-categorization-based process of depersonalized attraction. Results provide tentative support for the proposition that prototype embodiment impacts subsequent judgments of celebrity social attractiveness. Specifically, social attraction was most effectively predicted by ingroup prototype embodiment along the dimension of intelligence addressed in the induction, influencing liking of both ingroup (White) and outgroup (Black) target celebrities.

This article seeks to understand how relational uncertainty coincides with people’s ability to process relational information. The general premise is that individuals experiencing relational uncertainty should have difficulty deriving inferences because they lack the knowledge necessary to identify and interpret relational cues. The authors use this reasoning to deduce hypotheses about how relational uncertainty may correspond with people’s perceptions of relationship talk, judgments of relational messages, and evaluations of the difficulty of interaction. They conducted a study of conversations between romantic partners (N = 120 couples). As predicted, relational uncertainty was negatively associated with people’s perceptions of relationship talk after controlling for the perceptions of third-party observers. Relational uncertainty was negatively associated with the extremity of people’s judgments about relational messages. Furthermore, relational uncertainty was positively associated with people’s perceptions of the difficulty of interaction. They conclude by discussing how these findings illuminate the connection between relational uncertainty and relational information processing.

Normative restructuring strategies currently under way to combat alcohol-related problems among U.S. college students are based on the idea that students harbor inflated perceptions about the prevalence of drinking on campus and that if these misperceptions can be corrected, then alcohol consumption will decrease. Evidence for the effectiveness of these strategies is lacking, and there is little discussion in the literature about how or why people’s normative beliefs exert influence on their behaviors. The theory of normative social behavior that is proposed in this article includes three mechanisms—injunctive norms, outcome expectations, and group identity—that are hypothesized to moderate the influence of descriptive norms on behavior. This theory is tested through a survey (N = 1,352) conducted among incoming college students. Although all normative mechanisms predicted behavioral intention, four of the six variables also interacted with descriptive norms to influence intention, with relatively smaller effects. Overall, the model was able to predict 63% of the variance in intention to consume alcohol. Implications for health campaigns are discussed.