The implementation of warning labels has been shown to slow the spread of harmful content on social media, but the mechanisms by which these interventions affect individuals' sharing decisions are not yet known. This study sought to establish the efficacy of these interventions and to explore the mechanisms of their influence using two parallel studies conducted within the United States: an online experiment that tested the effects of cannabis warning labels on sharing intentions (N = 1,776), and a neuroimaging study (N = 40) to examine how warning labels influenced activity in brain regions implicated in sharing decisions. Results demonstrated that warning labels paired with cannabis posts reduced intentions to share and were associated with decreased activation of brain regions associated with self-processing compared to cannabis posts alone. These results suggest that warning labels may discourage sharing by negatively influencing perceptions of self-relevance.

Using national probability data from the 2022 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, the present study evaluated whether moderators of the association between frequency of pornography exposure and condomless sex are consistent with the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model's (AM) suppositions about the facilitating effects of wishful identification and decreased self-regulation and forethought capacity. Consistent with the AM, two-way interaction effect analysis indicated that the strength of the positive association between exposure frequency and condomless sex increased as identification intensified. Inconsistent with the AM, two-way interaction effect analysis indicated that the association between exposure frequency and condomless sex was not significantly different among those who had and had not consumed alcohol before their last sexual encounter. However, the three-way interaction between exposure frequency, identification, and alcohol use did suggest a role for each AM moderator, as the catalyzing effect of identification was operable among those who had consumed alcohol only.

Characters play an integral role in animated narratives, but their visual racial presentation has received limited attention. A diverse group of U.S. children watched a 15-min physical activity-promoting animated Sci-Fi narrative. They were randomly assigned to one of three conditions, which varied the lead characters' racial presentation: realistic racially unambiguous (Original: White children, Black mother), realistic racially ambiguous (Ambiguous: All with brown skin without specified race/ethnicity), and fantastical racially ambiguous (Fantastical: All with brown skin with fantastical hair-and-eye color schemes). We assessed narrative engagement, wishful identification, and physical activity intention. Controlling for social desirability and multigroup ethnic identity, children who watched Fantastical characters showed significantly higher narrative engagement than those who watched Original characters, but they did not statistically differ from those who watched Ambiguous characters. Structural equation modeling indicated that narrative engagement and wishful identification fully mediated the racial representation effect (Fantastical vs. Original) on physical activity intention.

Communicators frequently make adjustments to accommodate receivers' characteristics. One strategy for accommodation is to enhance the relevance of communication for receivers. The current work uses -a communication strategy where information is disseminated to audiences believed to experience heightened risk for a health condition-to test whether and why targeting health information based on marginalized racial identities backfires. Online experimental findings from Black and White adults recruited via MTurk (Study 1) and Prolific Academic (Study 2) showed that Black Americans who received targeted (vs. nontargeted) health messages about HIV or flu reported decreased attention to the message and reduced trust in the message provider. White Americans did not differentially respond to targeting. Findings also demonstrated that (a) these negative consequences emerged for Black Americans due to social identity threat, and (b) these consequences predicted downstream cognitive and behavioral responses. Study 2 showed that these consequences replicated when the targeting manipulation signaled relevance directly via marginalized racial identities. Collectively, findings demonstrate that race-based targeting may lead to overaccommodation, thus precluding the expected benefits of relevance.

Contemporary communication requires both a supply of content and a digital information infrastructure. Modern campaigns of misinformation are especially dependent on that back-end infrastructure for tracking and targeting a sympathetic audience and generating revenue that can sustain the campaign financially-if not enable profiteering. However, little is known about the political economy of misinformation, particularly those campaigns spreading misleading or harmful content about public health guidelines and vaccination programs. To understand the political economy of health misinformation, we analyze the content and infrastructure networks of 59 groups involved in communicating misinformation about vaccination programs. With a unique collection of tracker and communication infrastructure data, we demonstrate how the political economy of misinformation depends on platform monetization infrastructures. We offer a theory of communication resource mobilization that advances understanding of the communicative context, organizational interactions, and political outcomes of misinformation production.

k=, N=.

In today's complex media environment, does media coverage influence youth and young adults' (YYA) tobacco use and intentions? We conceptualize the "public communication environment" and effect mediators, then ask whether over time variation in exogenously measured tobacco media coverage from mass and social media sources predicts daily YYA cigarette smoking intentions measured in a rolling nationally representative phone survey (N = 11,847 on 1,147 days between May 2014 and June 2017). Past week anti-tobacco and pro-tobacco content from Twitter, newspapers, broadcast news, Associated Press, and web blogs made coherent scales (thetas = 0.77 and 0.79). Opportunities for exposure to anti-tobacco content in the past week predicted lower intentions to smoke (Odds ratio [OR] = 0.95, p < .05, 95% confidence interval [CI] = 0.91-1.00). The effect was stronger among current smokers than among nonsmokers (interaction OR = 0.88, p < .05, 95% CI = 0.77-1.00). These findings support specific effects of anti-tobacco media coverage and illustrate a productive general approach to conceptualizing and assessing effects in the complex media environment.

Ambivalence is a phenomenon that transcends disciplinary divides and is associated with a myriad of mixed outcomes. Yet, identifying and representing the complexities of ambivalent experiences can be difficult using traditional qualitative methods. Thus, the goal of the present study was to advance a qualitative method, thematic co-occurrence analysis, to address this issue. To illustrate the usefulness of this method, I present a case study detailing 35 estranged adult children's ambivalent responses and reactions to their parents' (non)contact during the COVID-19 pandemic. Findings reveal seven themes and four (non)relationships between them that reflect (a) theme independence, (b) unilateral co-occurrence, (c) unbalanced co-occurrence, and (d) complementary co-occurrence. These findings advance a theory of ambivalence and corresponding method to aid in the future investigations of ambivalent phenomena.

The digital text traces left by computer-mediated communication (CMC) provide a new opportunity to test theories of relational processes that were originally developed through observation of face-to-face interactions. Communication accommodation theory, for example, suggests that conversation partners' verbal (and non-verbal) behaviors become more similar as relationships develop. Using a corpus of 1+ million text messages that 41 college-age romantic couples sent to each other during their first year of dating, this study examines how linguistic alignment of new romantic couples' CMC changes during relationship formation. Results from nonlinear growth models indicate that three aspects of daily linguistic alignment (syntactic-language style matching, semantic-latent semantic analysis, overall-cosine similarity) all exhibit exponential growth to an asymptote as romantic relationships form. Beyond providing empirical support that communication accommodation theory also applies in romantic partners' CMC, this study demonstrates how relational processes can be examined using digital trace data.

There has been much discussion worldwide about the crisis of trust, with evidence of declining trust in social, economic, political and media institutions. The rise of populism, and the differing impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic between nations, has been drawing attention to wider implications of pervasive distrust, including distrust of the media. In this article, I develop three propositions. First, I identify trust studies as a rich interdisciplinary field, linking communication to other branches of the social sciences and humanities. Second, I argue that we lack a comprehensive account of how trust has been understood in communication, and that doing so requires integrating macro-societal approaches with the "meso" level of institutions, and the "micro" level of interpersonal communication. Third, I propose that a focus upon trust would open up new perspectives on two important topics-the future of news media and journalism, and the global rise of populism.

Over the last two decades, news-oriented comedy programs have risen to compete with traditional hard news media as sources of information about politics. To the extent that a politically knowledgeable electorate is necessary for a thriving democracy, understanding the mechanisms underlying the extent to which political comedy facilitates or inhibits a well-informed citizenry is critical. Across two studies, we use behavioral experiments and neuroimaging to examine the causal effects of humor on the desire to share and the capacity to remember political information. We find that humor increases the likelihood to share political information with others and enhances people's memory for information. Humor also increases brain response in regions associated with understanding other people's mental states (i.e., mentalizing), which advances a theoretical framework that humor may facilitate considerations of others' views (e.g., how other people will respond to shared political information).

Media content can shape people's descriptive norm perceptions by presenting either population-level prevalence information or descriptions of individuals' behaviors. Supervised machine learning and crowdsourcing can be combined to answer new, theoretical questions about the ways in which normative perceptions form and evolve through repeated, incidental exposure to normative mentions emanating from the media environment. Applying these methods, this study describes tobacco and e-cigarette norm prevalence and trends over 37 months through an examination of a census of 135,764 long-form media texts, 12,262 popular YouTube videos, and 75,322,911 tweets. Long-form texts mentioned tobacco population norms (4-5%) proportionately less often than e-cigarette population norms (20%). Individual use norms were common across sources, particularly YouTube (tobacco long-form: 34%; Twitter: 33%; YouTube: 88%; e-cigarette long form: 17%; Twitter: 16%; YouTube: 96%). The capacity to capture aggregated prevalence and temporal dynamics of normative media content permits asking population-level media effects questions that would otherwise be infeasible to address.

n n p

Misinformation can influence personal and societal decisions in detrimental ways. Not only is misinformation challenging to correct, but even when individuals accept corrective information, misinformation can continue to influence attitudes: a phenomenon known as belief echoes, affective perseverance, or the continued influence effect. Two controlled experiments tested the efficacy of narrative-based correctives to reduce this affective residual in the context of misinformation about organic tobacco. Study 1 ( = 385) tested within-narrative corrective endings, embedded in four discrete emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, and fear). Study 2 ( = 586) tested the utility of a narrative with a negative, emotional corrective ending (fear and anger). Results provide some evidence that narrative correctives, with or without emotional endings, can be effective at reducing misinformed beliefs and intentions, but narratives consisting of emotional corrective endings are better at correcting attitudes than a simple corrective. Implications for misinformation scholarship and corrective message design are discussed.

Disclosing personal information to another person has beneficial emotional, relational, and psychological outcomes. When disclosers believe they are interacting with a computer instead of another person, such as a chatbot that can simulate human-to-human conversation, outcomes may be undermined, enhanced, or equivalent. Our experiment examined downstream effects after emotional versus factual disclosures in conversations with a supposed chatbot or person. The effects of emotional disclosure were equivalent whether participants thought they were disclosing to a chatbot or to a person. This study advances current understanding of disclosure and whether its impact is altered by technology, providing support for media equivalency as a primary mechanism for the consequences of disclosing to a chatbot.

Several message topic selection approaches propose that messages based on beliefs pretested and found to be more strongly associated with intentions will be more effective in changing population intentions and behaviors when used in a campaign. This study aimed to validate the underlying causal assumption of these approaches which rely on cross-sectional belief-intention associations. We experimentally tested whether messages addressing promising themes as identified by the above criterion were more persuasive than messages addressing less promising themes. Contrary to expectations, all messages increased intentions. Interestingly, mediation analyses showed that while messages deemed promising affected intentions through changes in targeted promising beliefs, messages deemed less promising also achieved persuasion by influencing nontargeted promising beliefs. Implications for message topic selection are discussed.

This study examined how intrinsic as well as perceived message features affect the extent to which online health news stories prompt audience selections and social retransmissions, and how news-sharing channels (e-mail vs. social media) shape what goes viral. The study analyzed actual behavioral data on audience viewing and sharing of health news articles, and associated article content and context data. News articles with high informational utility and positive sentiment invited more frequent selections and retransmissions. Articles were also more frequently selected when they presented controversial, emotionally evocative, and familiar content. Informational utility and novelty had stronger positive associations with e-mail-specific virality, while emotional evocativeness, content familiarity, and exemplification played a larger role in triggering social media-based retransmissions.

In March 2012, the CDC launched "Tips from Former Smokers," a $54 million national campaign featuring individuals experiencing long-term health consequences of smoking. The campaign approach was based on strong evidence that anti-tobacco ads portraying fear, graphic images, and personal testimonials are associated with attitudinal and behavior change. Yet it was also controversial; critics cited the danger that viewers might reject such intensely graphic messages. Tasked with informing this debate, our study analyzes the corpus of Tips campaign-related tweets obtained via the Twitter Firehose. We provide a novel and rigorous method for media campaign evaluation within the framework of the Extended Parallel Process Model. Among the relevant Tweets, 87% showed evidence of message acceptance, while 7% exhibited message rejection.

This research empirically tests whether using a fictional narrative produces a greater impact on health-related knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intention than presenting the identical information in a more traditional, nonfiction, non-narrative format. European American, Mexican American, and African American women ( = 758) were surveyed before and after viewing either a narrative or non-narrative cervical cancer-related film. The narrative was more effective in increasing cervical cancer-related knowledge and attitudes. Moreover, in response to the narrative featuring Latinas, Mexican Americans were most transported, identified most with the characters, and experienced the strongest emotions. Regressions revealed that transportation, identification with specific characters, and emotion each contributed to shifts in knowledge, attitudes, and behavioral intentions. Thus, narrative formats may provide a valuable tool in reducing health disparities.