Programs › Columbus, OH
Studies how ethnic-specific strategic messages and stereotypes in media affect minority audiences, and how race and partisanship shape fears about interracial conversations on political issues.
Studies social interactions, social networks, and political behavior, including misinformation beliefs across election cycles, frequently using computational and network methods.
Studies the causes, consequences, and remedies of human aggression and violence, testing popular myths about guns, venting anger, self-esteem, and whether violence and sex sell products.
Studies the social uses and consequences of mobile media, including habit and automaticity, civic life, teens' phone use, and solitude and well-being in an always-connected era.
Studies intersections between media, health, and identities.
Studies online self-presentation, impression management, and person perception, including how people judge the credibility and authenticity of online information in health and political contexts.
Studies political talk and interpersonal communication networks, examining exposure to partisan and racial disagreement and its effects on knowledge, participation, and polarization.
Studies how social media, virtual reality, video games, robots, and conversational agents shape identities, attitudes, and behaviors, using experiments, surveys, content analysis, and interviews.
Studies how online news use, selective exposure, and exposure to falsehoods and corrections shape political beliefs in U.S. elections using panel surveys, online experiments, and behavioral data.
Studies how entertainment narratives such as television storylines influence attitudes and behaviors on health and social issues, and children's emotional reactions to news and entertainment.
Studies media effects on young children, including links between television exposure and executive function and theory of mind, and how parental mediation shapes children's responses.
Studies how audio elements of media messages affect audience attention and emotion through experiments combining self-reports with heart rate, skin conductance, facial EMG, eye tracking, and EEG.
Develops theories of selective exposure and narrative influence, such as the Reinforcing Spirals Model, and studies media and health prevention, especially alcohol and tobacco use.
Studies motivation, emotion, and cognition in media processing and choice using psychophysiological measures and dynamic and quantum probabilistic computational models, including mHealth design.
Studies how smartphone and social media habits change the mental processes underlying social connection and digital well-being, using mobile methods that collect device and survey data.
Studies cognitive obstacles that limit young children's learning from socioemotional and science media, and how nostalgic media prompts self-comparisons affecting adults' well-being.
Studies what eye movements reveal about memory, knowledge, and decisions about civic and scientific information, and how technologies that infer from eye tracking can be trusted and governed.
Studies how misinformation, bigoted discourse, and violent rhetoric on social media distort public engagement with politicized science topics such as climate change and emerging technologies.
Studies how audiences make moral judgments of characters in popular media narratives and how these context-dependent judgments help explain polarization and schadenfreude.
Studies the social and psychological effects of media messages on audiences' perceptions of African Americans, women, and other marginalized groups, bridging journalism and media effects.
Studies cancer and chronic disease risk perceptions, health information seeking, and disparities, and develops tools for communicating family health history and genetic risk.
Studies interpersonal message design, persuasion, and argumentation from a constructivist view, including how children develop communication abilities and how deliberation shapes civic discourse.
Studies cognitive and affective processes in social media use, computer-mediated communication, and human-computer interaction.
Studies sex and gender messages in video games and how interactivity shapes players' emotional processing, using content analysis, surveys, experiments, and interviews.
Studies and designs online social networks that promote social support, credible health information, and health behavior change, including AI tools to counter health misinformation.
Studies the history of the Black press and the relationship between mass media and traditionally discriminated groups through journalism history research.
Studies how message design can increase engagement with politics, science, and health, especially among underrepresented groups, drawing on social cognition and social influence.
Studies the dynamics of everyday face-to-face and mediated interpersonal interactions using dyadic methods, intensive longitudinal data, ecological momentary assessment, and screenshot sequences.
Studies why people engage with narrative entertainment, how media serves as a coping tool, and how media use and relationships shape each other, including through experiments.
Studies human interaction with AI for self-expression and interpersonal communication, such as identity management and supportive communication, using mixed methods and building human-centered AI.
Studies the mechanisms and contexts that bias moral judgments, combining entertainment media and interpersonal communication theories with moral psychology.
Studies intergroup communication, stereotype interventions, and prejudice reduction, including media representations of race, religion, refugees, and immigrants, and health communication.
Studies how family processes, context, and individual differences shape children's technology use and well-being, using experience sampling and long-lag longitudinal panel data.
Studies the supply and demand sides of the information environment and how they and misinformation shape public opinion on issues like climate change and vaccination.