Brent J. Hale

University of Southern Mississippi | USM · School of Communication

The growth of digital technologies has enabled the creation of online platforms for sex workers to share, create, and gather information. To elucidate how this community leverages social media, the current study analyzed how sex workers and related groups (e.g. clients) communicate in a pseudonymous online space – r/SexWorkers. A content analysis o...

In the context of the increasing proliferation of users on social networking sites (SNS) and the ensuing debate on their benefits and drawbacks, this study examines the interconnection between human behaviors and identity formation on Facebook. We leveraged the concept of plural identity, seeking to identify relationships between online social beha...

Recent scholarship has suggested the presence of website-delineated social identities within social media platforms, couched within the social identity model of deindividuation effects, and evidenced by distinct commenting patterns between networks. This study experimentally evaluated the possibility that Imgur users self-categorize and identify wi...

Emerging research has begun examining the utility of social media platforms for information dissemination during the COVID-19 pandemic. Following this developing thread, this work examines discourse within r/coronavirus, a Reddit forum (i.e., subreddit) developed to curate COVID-19 information that burgeoned during the early months of the pandemic....

This study tests the effects of camera distance and camera angle on emotional response across four categories of pictures covering a large emotional range (positive and negative miscellanea, erotica, and threat), using the International Affective Picture System (IAPS) –a large database of emotionally evocative photographs. We content analyzed 722 i...

People who are affected by cancer can benefit greatly from social support and digital social networks, though our understanding of online support is primarily founded in dominant platforms like Facebook. In addition, while previous scholarship indicates that social support is available online, little research has examined predictors of support prov...

Drawing from framing theory, this paper operationalizes and tests three ways to measure how verbal and visual modalities interplay in audiovisual messages to produce meaning. The measures include (a) a ratio of verbal to visual frames; (b) an association rules procedure (ARL); and (c) in-depth analysis of the full audiovisual material. As a step to...

Personalization refers to the journalistic practice of including emotional case studies of ordinary people in news stories, increasing vividness and emotional charge of news and eliciting identification and empathy in news consumers. Previous research suggests that personalization of news stories increases collectivistic (compared with individualis...

Objectives: A growing body of health communication scholarship has explored the utility of social media platforms for eliciting social support, although much of this scholarship has focused on Facebook and Twitter. This study contributes to this body of research by identifying support in comments submitted to depression-related Imgur posts. Furthe...

Social support research has demonstrated the physical and psychological benefits of social support for patients, but has done little to identify successful strategies for eliciting social support. However, contemporary digital channels offer new ways to examine this issue. In particular, this study explores vlogging as a coping strategy for cancer...

U.S. political party genderization (Republicans as masculine; Democrats as feminine) is well-documented in research. To determine if Hillary Clinton may have disrupted these patterns as the first female major-party presidential nominee, Reddit posts during the 2016 election campaign were analyzed. Most studies focus on professional news or candidat...

Background: Anonymous verbal attacks against overweight individuals on social media are common and widespread. These comments often use negative, misogynist, or derogatory words, which stigmatize the targeted individuals with obesity. These verbal attacks may cause depression in overweight individuals, which could subsequently promote unhealthy ea...

This research is among the first to attempt quantitative analysis of a site-bound digital subculture by identifying commenting regularities, using Imgur as a case study. A theoretical framework using SIDE theory and common voice informs a content analysis of 105 Imgur posts and 4404 comments in which the Imgur subculture is identified. Building on...