David R. Ewoldsen

• Ph.D. in Psychology and Communication
• Professor (Full) at Michigan State University

Previous research investigated how a shared human identity may promote interracial inclusion in the context of mass media (Ellithorpe et al., 2018). The original study found promising results of reduced intergroup prejudice through watching the supernatural genre. However, the original results had mixed support to theory, that is, the Common Ingrou...

Competition and cooperation are both essential to human evolution and social interactions. Humans naturally compete with each other over resources, yet humans also evolved to engage in cooperation to enhance survivability. Competition and cooperation as complex social interactions can be observed in many contexts. Video games are a vivid illustrati...

Avatars are customizable digital representations of people used in digital games. Self-discrepancy theory hypothesizes that people have three general representations of the self: actual, ought, and ideal. Two studies, one survey and the other experimental, explored the relationship between self-discrepancy theory, embodiment, and people’s avatars....

The Media Use Model (MUM) presents a metatheoretical framework that aims to unify several existing theories of media processes and effects. It uses a constraint satisfaction approach to coherence to explain the dynamic relationship between a media consumer’s motivations, expectations, individual differences, and, primarily, their cognitive processi...

Communication scholars demonstrated a remarkable level of methodological creativity to overcome the restrictions on conducting research necessitated by the pandemic. This methodological creativity allowed us to provide answers to many critical questions that arouse during the pandemic. Now the risk is that scholars will diminish data gathered durin...

The acquisition of school readiness skills upon kindergarten entry predicts children’s success later in life. Yet many parents, especially in under-resourced communities, lack confidence in their role as their child’s first educator. Public media-based interventions offer a scalable way to bring assistance into these communities, and likely effect...

Priming is a process through which mental constructs can be made temporarily more accessible in memory. This increase in accessibility then results in changes in judgments and behavior to be more consistent with the primed content. Media priming involves the effect of media coverage of an issue on people's later judgments. In the health arena, few...

Female gamers belong to a stereotyped social group. The stereotypes associated with female gamers may be associated with issues such as sexism and gender discrimination in the gaming community. However, few tools exist to properly assess the complex nature of the stereotypes held about this group. The present article describes the development and v...

Retrospective imaginative involvement (RII) is a concept that encapsulates how audiences reflect back on a narrative’s characters and events after the story has ended. The current study aims to explicate the antecedents of RII in order to provide initial steps toward creating a theory of RII. Through two studies, we tested the role of familiarity,...

The effects of excitation transfer have been studied in different scenarios for decades, yet have not been tested much in immersive interactive media environments with back-to-back, rapidly switching media consumption. Excitation transfer theory denotes that the arousal induced by an initial stimulus could carry over to the subsequent stimulus that...

Bounded Generalized Reciprocity (BGR) hypothesizes that expectations of reciprocity provide the foundation for ingroup favoritism and outgroup derogation. These expectations can be influenced by interaction with outgroup members, including vicarious interaction through media. This analysis examines how non-Black participants view helping behavior b...

Retrospective imaginative involvement (RII) describes people’s asynchronous cognitive involvement with a narrative. Accordingly, RII focuses on what people do with narratives (and how they think about them) after the original story has ended. RII is conceptualized in keeping with the model of narrative comprehension and engagement and the theory of...

Two survey studies, one with a college sample (Study 1, n = 245) and one with a national U.S. adult sample (Study 2, n = 590) examined how media messages can influence attitudes toward Black people in the U.S. A novel contribution is the role of Bounded Generalized Reciprocity, or the belief that members of an outgroup are likely to return a favor...

The present study utilized two theories (the common ingroup identity model; expectation states theory) to examine male players' intention to play video games with a female player. Consistent with the common ingroup identity model, male participants who were exposed to a pseudo Xbox profile presenting a woman as a stereotypical gamer showed stronger...

The same media content can be interpreted by different people in radically different ways. We propose a framework that considers both the cognitive processes and the associated mental representations implicated in the interpretation of media content. The foundation of this argument stems from a constraint satisfaction approach to coherence, and it...

Objective This study provided a first empirical test of the Reverse Dynamic Theory of Reasoned Action (RDTRA) developed by Boster et al. Design In a longitudinal experiment, 169 participants were exposed to a WHO handwashing-guidelines behavioural induction, followed by an immediate posttest and a follow-up one week later. Main outcome measures T...

This chapter provides an overview of emotion measurement in media research. We first reviewed measuring approaches that conceptualized emotion as a property of the media message irrespective of viewers. We then reviewed approaches of measuring emotion as a user's response to media messages. Self-report, behavioral, physiological, and neurological m...

This study investigates how object affordances modulate approach and avoidance behaviors in virtual reality (VR). The primary hypotheses are that 1) motivational relevance shapes facilitation or inhibition of behaviors while interacting with virtual objects, and that 2) approach-avoidance can be quantified using spatial and temporal aspects of beha...

Taking advantage of the divergent strategies for instruction at different universities during the COVID-19 pandemic, this study presents a quasi-experiment comparing narrative media use by students at an online-only university (lower social interaction) with those at an in-person university (higher social interaction). To do so, we rely on perspect...

Dubbed the Proteus effect, research has shown that avatars influence user behavior in virtual reality and video game environments (Yee & Bailenson, 2007, 2009); however, does this same effect occur in the less dynamic but more prevalent traditional computer-mediated communication (CMC)? As CMC evolves to allow user avatars, the question of its infl...

Temporarily expanded boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) proposes underlying motivations for engaging with stories. TEBOTS points out that fundamental human drives for agency, autonomy, and connectedness are imperfectly attainable. As a result, human beings turn to transcendent experiences that offer self-expansion, especially engagement with mediated...

Anecdotal evidence suggests that audience members frequently engage in imaginative thinking of entertainment messages they have consumed. Manifestations of such retrospective imaginative involvement (RII) may range from short episodes of daydreaming or mind wandering in which entertainment content (e.g., characters, locations, events) play a centra...

Network models of memory were developed in the 1970s to explain how information is represented in memory and how information in declarative memory is processed. This entry summarizes the basic assumptions of network models of memory and briefly discusses three domains where network models have been used to study media psychology.

Levels of processing theory was developed in the early 1970s to explain how different types of judgments influenced people's memory. The theory maintained that if people engaged in deeper processing of information when they acquired that information, they would have better memory for that information. The theory has been used by media psychologists...

Epistemology involves the study of how people come to know. Scientific research uses inductive reasoning to move from specific observations of a phenomena to more general theories that attempt to explain the phenomenon. Logical positivists argued that value‐free observation could result in objective observations that could be used to advance knowle...

How people process information is of central importance to media psychologists. A basic distinction in the study of information processing involves automatic and controlled processes. Automatic processes are typically triggered by something in the environment and, once triggered, they operate outside the control of the individual and typically cann...

Narratives are a cultural universal. All cultures have narratives, but the question is why humans are so attracted to narratives. The temporarily expanding the boundaries of the self theory (TEBOTS) argues that the appeal of narratives is that they provide a way for people to deal with the everyday stressors of protecting the self from threats, mai...

Priming refers to the effect of some proceeding stimulus or event on how we react, broadly defined, to some subsequent stimuli. Priming was originally developed as a methodology in cognitive psychology in the early 1970s to test the theoretical predictions of early network models of memory. There are a substantial number of different types of primi...

Unfortunately, prejudice continues to be a major problem across society. Research on prejudice is difficult because people are often motivated to avoid expressing prejudice because it is typically not socially accepted to express prejudicial attitudes and behaviors. Explicit measures of prejudice are typically paper and pencil measures where people...

Cognitive dissonance theory is one of the classic theories of attitudes. The theory was originally proposed in 1957. Although limiting conditions to the theory have been identified, the basic tenets of the theory are still accepted. The theory posits that when people engage in behavior that is inconsistent with their beliefs, they will experience d...

The Revised Ethopoeia Concept proposes that agents should activate human schema in the form of social expectations and rules. However, studies have demonstrated inconsistent reactions to agents and avatars, potentially due to the activation of a nonhuman schema that constrains people's ability to mentally connect with agents. We first examined whet...

This study aims to apply the concept of affordances (J. Gibson, 1979)to the context of immersive virtual reality (VR). As a first step, this study investigates users' visual orienting and exploratory behaviors while they navigate a virtual house indexed by their gaze on virtual objects, viewing time, and time spent in different rooms in the environ...

This study examines how social comparison information provided by video game leaderboards may influence players’ retrospective judgments of autonomy, competence, and relatedness need fulfillment. Participants played a video game and were randomly assigned to receive no postgame feedback or were shown a leaderboard that placed them in the top or bot...

Individuals have a need to maintain positive social interactions, and with the advent of new-media technologies, there are a myriad ways individuals can satisfy this need by engaging socially in mediated (non-face-to-face) communication, hence the need for a special issue on “Relationships in the Digital Age.” The articles in this special issue ref...

Individuals have a need to maintain positive social interactions and with the advent of new media technologies, there are a myriad ways individuals can satisfy this need by engaging socially in mediated (non-face-to-face) communication, hence the need for a special issue on Relationships in the Digital Age. The articles in this special issue reflec...

This chapter explores how being perpetually connected and perpetually online affects experience with narrative. We outline a model for understanding the complex interplay between media multitasking and narrative engagement. We suggest that the relevance of multitasking to the narrative, and the sociality of that multitasking, influence narrative en...

The concept of paradigms emerged from Thomas Kuhn's (1970) Structure of Scientific Revolutions. In this theory of science, Kuhn posited that mature sciences operate within a scientific paradigm. A paradigm emerges out of the classic research exemplars within a research domain. These exemplars operate as models for how to do science within that para...

The study of cognitive processes and representations has emerged as an important research area during the past 30 years. Measures of attention include eyes on screen, eye tracking, and secondary task reaction time. Measures of memory include recall, recognition, and word fragment completion tasks. Reaction times are used to measure accessibility an...

Engagement with narratives and identification with narrative characters is usually conceptualized as occurring during the narrative experience itself. However, much involvement with a story world and narrative characters may occur retrospectively and imaginatively. The present study, using a cross-sectional survey quota-sampled to represent U.S. de...

This study describes the results from a feasibility study of an innovative indicated prevention intervention with hybrid face-to-face and web-based components for preadolescent youth. This intervention includes a considerably briefer set of face-to-face sessions from the evidence-based Coping Power program and a carefully integrated internet compon...

Comprehension is integral to enjoyment of media narratives, yet our understanding of how viewers create the situation models that underlie comprehension is limited. This study utilizes two models of comprehension that had previously been tested with factual texts/videos to predict viewers' recall of entertainment media. Across five television/film...

Delayed message recall may be influenced by currently held accessible attitudes, the nature of the message, and message perceptions (perception of bias and message elaboration). This study examined the potential of message perceptions to mediate the influence of valenced attitude accessibility and message type on unaided recall of anti-smoking Publ...

Many people with a mental disorder fail to obtain professional treatment for a diagnosable mental disorder, and some turn to media outlets for diagnosis and treatment recommendations; however, little is known about outcomes associated with exposure to media mental health professionals. We reasoned that exposure to Dr. Phil would be associated with...

The temporarily expanding boundaries of the self (TEBOTS) model identifies challenges faced by the self as a fundamental impetus for engagement with mediated narratives. To test how everyday pressures on the self influence enjoyment, appreciation, and immersion into narrative worlds, this study used self-affirmation to alleviate the everyday demand...

The presence of non-humans in media narratives - for example, in the supernatural genre - may make salient that we are all human. According to the common ingroup identity model, the human superordinate category should influence attitudes toward lower-level outgroups. The present study examines this in the context of ethnic outgroups, specifically A...

The cultivation effect is well established: The more media we consume, the more our worldviews come to reflect the mediated world. Several advancements have been made in the past decade exploring the processes underlying the effect. Importantly, the judgments are often heuristically based (Shrum, 200130. Shrum, L. J. (2001). Processing strategy mod...

Implicit measures such as the Implicit Association Test (IAT) and the Personalized-IAT can be useful tools for studying automatic processes and socially sensitive topics. But with them come issues with data preparation and analysis because they rely on reaction time data. Dealing with reaction time data can be complex, particularly with the IAT or...

Through a social identity theoretical lens, this study examines how nurses' identification with their working small group, unit, or floor, nursing role (e.g., staff ER nurse, nurse practitioner), and nursing profession relate to nurses' interaction involvement, willingness to confront conflict, feelings of learned helplessness, and tenure (employme...

Research on video game violence has found largely consistent evidence that violence in video games tends to be associated with an increase in antisocial behavior. However, this body of work has mostly ignored one prominent feature of many violent games: moral decision making. It is possible that the influence of video game violence could change whe...

This study tests propositions derived from the larger notion that entertainment narratives offer the individual a means by which to alleviate the psychological demands of the self. Specifically, individuals in a state of reduced self-control were expected to experience greater enjoyment, audience response, transportation, and identification during...

Attitude and norm accessibility influence social behavior and how messages are processed. The Motivation and Opportunity as DEterminants (MODE) model is offered as a framework for understanding when attitude and norm accessibility should play an important role in social behavior. In this article, we outline the MODE model and consider the implicati...

Although research suggests political ambivalence prevails in the American public, little attention has been paid to the mechanisms through which a person's attitude structure and relevant antecedents interact to create ambivalence. This article aims to summarize and synthesize the results of existing studies on ambivalence in order to construct a c...

Numerous studies have shown that playing violent video games alone increases subsequent aggression. However, social game play is becoming more popular than solo game play, and research suggests cooperative game play is beneficial for players. The current studies explore the effects of cooperative game play on player’s subsequent aggressive behavior...

Elevation is a feeling of meaningfulness and poignancy, which makes people feel more connected to humanity. The experience of elevation often arises as a result of media narratives, usually those that depict moral virtue or connectedness. Elevating media has a number of positive effects on media consumers, both emotionally and behaviorally. The pre...

A wide variety of motivations for engaging with narratives have been proposed and studied. We propose that underlying these motivations is another, more fundamental motivation. Our premise is that maintenance, defense, and regulation of the personal and social self in daily life are demanding both emotionally and cognitively. Moreover, any individu...

Attitudes have long been a focus of study by social scientists. In the first edition of the Handbook of social psychology in 1935, Gordon Allport referred to attitudes as an indispensable concept for social psychology. Today, attitudes have become an essential concept for the social sciences. Attitudes, defined as an evaluative response to an objec...

Media psychology involves the scientific examination of the cognitive processes and behavior involved in the selection, use, interpretation, and effects of communication across a variety of media (e.g., via the Internet, television, telephone, film). Media are central to people's lives, with projections indicating that an average person spent over...

The accessibility of attitudes and norms (i.e., how quickly they are activated from memory) has been shown to predict young adult cigarette smoking, but prior work has not examined this effect in young adolescents or with other health risk behaviors. In this study, the accessibility of attitudes and norms was used to predict young adolescent (N = 3...

Based on portrayals of dissonance as a learned drive state, it was hypothesized that there may be a role for parenting style and related variables in the development of dissonance reactions. This experiment found that both reports of having parents with authoritarian parenting styles and learning the link between responsibility and consequences mod...

Research suggests that video games are becoming a social activity. Previous research has neglected the complicated social context in which people now play video games. However, a growing body of literature suggests that playing violent video games cooperatively with others can attenuate their aggression-facilitating effects and increase prosocial b...

http://www.tandfonline.com/eprint/GCSIjakP7fuUqm4msh9K/full Theoretically, viewers of a movie strive to construct coherent men- tal models to understand the local events as they occur, and to link these situation mental models coherently to understand the movie as a whole. This article reports the results of two experiments on the impact of subtit...

Many people with a diagnosable mental illness do not receive professional treatment. Instead, they may turn to media mental health professionals for diagnosis and treatment recommendations. This study content analyzed episodes of Dr. Phil and issues of Psychology Today to determine what mental disorders are covered and treatments are recommended, a...

Previous research has demonstrated a positive influence of cooperative video game play on participants’ cooperative strategies (tit-for-tat behaviors) in a modified Prisoner’s Dilemma task (Ewoldsen et al., 2012). The current study tested whether these positive effects are applicable to ingroup and outgroup conflict. Eighty participants were assign...

Research on video games has yielded consistent findings that violent video games increase aggression and decrease prosocial behavior. However, these studies typically examined single-player games. Of interest is the effect of cooperative play in a violent video game on subsequent cooperative or competitive behavior. Participants played Halo II (a f...

The present study was designed to assess the effects of forewarning of explicit violence on the experience of suspense. Male and female undergraduate students were read one of two consent forms, which either alerted them to the violent and potentially offensive content of the film they were about to see or that assured them that the graphically vio...

Carrie Crenshaw is Assistant Professor of Communication Studies at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. David R. Roskos-Ewoldsen is the Reese Phifer Professor of Communication Studies and an Associative Professor of Psychology at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He also serves as coeditor of the journal Media Psycholog...

we began to write this chapter—with the overall goal of contributing to the rethinking of communication in mind—we began with a common perception of past thinking about communication. Specifically, that research on communication, and in particular on mass communication, has been, since its inception, burdened by a focus on effects, not just a focus...

What is communication science? We provide both simple and complex answers to the question posed in this chapter's title. Before attempting to answer the question, however, it is necessary to consider briefly the historical context within which communication emerged as a social scientific discipline. Detailed treatments of the development of communi...

Media campaigns can be an effective tool in reducing adolescent smoking. To better understand the types of ads that have been used in campaigns in the United States, a content analysis was conducted of ads available at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Media Campaign Resource Center (MCRC; Waves 1 through 7). A total of 487...

Self-affirmation reduces defensive responses to threatening health information, but little is known about the cognitive processes instigated by self-affirmation. This study tested whether self-affirmation increases responsiveness to threatening health information at the implicit level. In an experimental study (N = 84), the authors presented high-...

This revision of a classic volume presents state-of-the-art reviews of established and emerging areas of communication science and provides an intellectual compass that points the way to future theorizing about communication processes. In this Second Edition of The Handbook of Communication Science, editors Charles R. Berger, Michael E. Roloff, and...

This article examines how cognitive structures and processes that highlight some aspects of messages but inhibit the salience of others affect adolescents' processing of public service announcements (PSAs). The cognitive structures assessed were attitude accessibility and decision styles (need for cognition and faith in intuition). A 2 (gender: mal...

The Landscape Model of text comprehension was extended to the comprehension of audiovisual discourse from text and video TV news stories. Concepts from the story were coded for activation after each sequence, creating a matrix of activations that was reduced to a vector of the degree of total activation for each concept. In Study 1, the degree vect...

The world wide web has revolutionized the ways in which people communicate (→ Exposure to the Internet; Internet). People can have simultaneous online chats with colleagues across the world. Yet, people often communicate with a single individual so the communication is in many ways like → Interpersonal Communication – except not face to face. Chatr...

Attitudes have long been a focus of study by social scientists. In the first edition of the Handbook of social psychology in 1935, Gordon Allport referred to attitudes as an indispensable concept for social psychology. Today, attitudes have become an essential concept for the social sciences. Attitudes, defined as an evaluative response to an objec...

Attitude accessibility concerns how quickly an → attitude is activated from → memory. Attitudes that are more accessible from memory are more predictive of behavior, influence what messages are attended to, and how those messages are processed, and are more stable across time. Unfortunately, little is known about how to change the accessibility of...

The present study examined how adolescents perceive the relationship between smoking and stress and where they learn that smoking cigarettes may be an effective stress-reduction mechanism. Eight focus groups were conducted with low-income African American and European American 14- to 16-year-olds in urban and rural locations, in which they suggeste...

Anti-smoking PSAs are not always effective in reducing cigarette smoking, and there is a lack of research into mechanisms through which PSAs affect the attitudes and behaviors of viewers. The present research was designed to better understand how smokers and non-smokers process anti-smoking ads. In a repeated measures design, the accessibility of s...

This research investigates the role of perceived health knowledge on the effectiveness of fear-based persuasive appeals. Undergraduates (N = 263) read a strong fear, weak fear, or efficacy-only message encouraging breast or testicular self-examination. As expected, results indicated that men high in subjective knowledge were less reactant and more...

Extensive media coverage of a political issue has been shown to influence, or prime, the criteria used to judge overall performance of political leaders. This political priming effect is traditionally explained with network models of memory, which identify priming intensity and recency as key factors in determining the strength and endurance of a p...