Elly A Konijn

Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam | VU · Department of Communication Science

This Event-Related Potential (ERP) study aimed to test how habitual and short-term violent video game exposure (VVGE) may affect empathy for pain responses in adolescents. In a within-subjects design, boys (N = 56; aged 12–16 years) performed a pain judgment task before and immediately after playing a violent video game. In this task, participants...

Previous research suggests that, compared to regular news, satirical news has its own frame repertoire, which differs by outlet characteristics (e.g. medium type, political leaning). We analyzed two large corpora of satirical and regular news: television show episodes (8,925,180 words) and online written articles (64,301,669 words) of liberal and c...

The rhetoric employed by right-wing populist parties (RWPPs) has been seen as a driver for their success. This right-wing populist (RWP) rhetoric is partly characterized by the use of anti-immigration metaphors and hyperboles, which likely appeal to voters’ grievances. We tested the persuasive impact of figuratively framed RWP rhetoric among a uniq...

Satirical news presents a critique of current affairs through humor. Previous research suggests that satirical news can have different humor forms (e.g. linguistic strategies) and humor contents (e.g. news topics, targets), and that such differences in humor characteristics can influence audience effects of satirical news. This paper extends this r...

Recently, much of the research in the empirical study of literature has focused on the transformative power of the reading experience, particularly on readers’ social cognitive abilities, such as empathy, and prosocial behavior. Foregrounding, i.e. the stylistic elements that create discrepancies with the common ‘automatic’ use of language, has be...

This study addresses the question to which extent individual online self-presentations become more similar globally, due globalisation and digitalisation, or whether ethno-racial identity predisposes individuals’ online self-presentation. That is, we examined the degree to which individuals varying in ethno-racial identity converge or diverge in on...

The present study explores the possibility to influence stigma about depression through exposure to a literary text. Such exposure is expected to foster identification, enhance empathic reactions and increase motivation for prosocial behaviour. In addition, foregrounding is expected to play a pivotal role in the potential effects of literary texts...

Especially these days, innovation and support from technology to relieve pressure in education is highly urgent. This study tested the potential advantage of a social robot over a tablet in (second) language learning on performance, engagement, and enjoyment. Shortages in primary education call for new technology solutions. Previous studies combine...

Social robots are reported to hold great potential for education. However, both scholars and key stakeholders worry about children’s social-emotional development being compromised. In aiming to provide new insights into the impact that social robots can have on the social-emotional development of children, the current study interviewed teachers who...

Developmental changes during adolescence may make youth susceptible to violent media effects. Two studies with male adolescents (N1 = 241; N2 = 161; aged 12–17) examined how habitual and short-term violent video gaming may affect emotion recognition and inhibitory control. We found that not habitual exposure to violent video games, but to antisocia...

Emotions and media need to be studied from a wide array of perspectives, each bringing unique insights. The first chapter of The Routledge International Handbook of Emotions and Media, therefore, provides an interdisciplinary approach on emotion and media ranging from sociologists and psychologists to media and communication perspectives. Emotions...

Previous research showed mixed evidence on how violent video game exposure (VVGE) may affect empathy for pain in the brain. This study applied an event-related potentials (ERPs) approach to improve understanding of how habitual and short-term violent gameplay may affect empathy for pain brain responses. Fifty-eight male participants with different...

Social robots are a promising new technology for primary education. However, they also introduce practical and moral challenges and there is an increasing demand for guidelines for a responsible, safe introduction of social robots. In this study, we identified and compared the moral considerations associated with the introduction of social robots i...

On a daily basis, individuals between 12 and 25 years of age engage with their mobile devices for many hours. Social Media Use (SMU) has important implications for the social life of younger individuals in particular. However, measuring SMU and its effects often poses challenges to researchers. In this exploratory study, we focus on some of these c...

Satirical news shows constitute an innovative hybrid genre that mixes regular news and fiction. The discursive integration hypothesis posits that the defining characteristic of satirical news shows is that news and fiction elements are integrated such that boundaries between the preexisting genres have blurred. The current study quantitatively test...

An ability to accurately recognize negative emotions in others can initiate pro-social behavior and prevent anti-social actions. Thus, it remains of an interest of scholars studying effects of violent video games. While exposure to such games was linked to slower emotion recognition, the evidence regarding accuracy of emotion recognition among play...

Young pediatric patients who undergo venipuncture or capillary blood sampling often experience high levels of pain and anxiety. This often results in distressed young patients and their parents, increased treatment times, and a higher workload for healthcare professionals. Social robots are a new and promising tool to mitigate children’s pain and a...

An ability to accurately recognize negative emotions in others can initiate pro-social behavior and prevent anti-social actions. Thus, it remains of an interest of scholars studying effects of violent video games. While exposure to such games was linked to slower emotion recognition, the evidence regarding accuracy of emotion recognition among play...

The increasing pressure on healthcare systems calls for innovative solutions, such as social robots. However, healthcare situations often are highly emotional while little is known about how people’s prior emotional state may affect the perception and acceptance of such robots. Following appraisal theories of emotion, the appraisal of coping potent...

Through a qualitative examination, the moral evaluations of Dutch care professionals regarding healthcare robots for eldercare in terms of biomedical ethical principles and non-utility are researched. Results showed that care professionals primarily focused on maleficence (potential harm done by the robot), deriving from diminishing human contact....

While social robots bring new opportunities for education, they also come with moral challenges. Therefore, there is a need for moral guidelines for the responsible implementation of these robots. When developing such guidelines, it is important to include different stakeholder perspectives. Existing (qualitative) studies regarding these perspectiv...

In the design of educational robots, it appears to be undecided as to whether robots should show social behaviors and look human-like or whether such cues are insignificant for learning. We conducted an experiment with different designs of social robots built from the same materials, which is unique in robotics research. The robots rehearsed multip...

The rhetoric used by right-wing anti-immigration politicians is considered important to their political success. Such rhetoric commonly contains figurative frames with metaphor and/or hyperbole. In two experiments (n experiment1 = 411, n experiment2 = 407), we tested when and how such figurative frames add to the intense and emotive character of an...

Despite growing body of research on video games effect on enhanced cognitive functioning, a relationship between violent video game exposure (VVGE) and inhibitory control is still poorly understood. Investigating inhibitory control mechanisms in relation to VVGE may help to better explain processes underlying aggression. This holds especially for a...

Previous research suggests that a defining characteristic of satirical news shows (e.g. The Daily Show) is discursive integration: a creative blend of genre conventions of regular news and fiction. This study aimed to extend the concept of discursive integration to another popular form of satirical news: written satirical news. We focused on both l...

This chapter presents an overview of advances in psychological emotion research that appeared of particular interest to studying media-related emotions. We briefly discuss how emotions in media research evolved and how multileveled perspectives on media-based emotions developed. Then, we discuss emotion regulation that inspired another line of rece...

In the design of educational robots, it seems undecided whether robots should show social behaviors and look human-like or that such cues are indifferent to learning. We conducted an experiment with different designs of social robots, rehearsing the multiplication tables with primary school children in Hong Kong. Results show that affective bonding...

Life-like humanoid robots are on the rise, aiming at communicative purposes that resemble humanlike conversation. In human social interaction, the facial expression serves important communicative functions. We examined whether a robot’s face is similarly important in human-robot communication. Based on emotion research and neuropsychological insigh...

Previous research suggests that particular formal features of film, such as the use of close-ups, can affect the levels of empathy experienced by viewers. As empathy is a key aspect of audience’s filmic experience, creative decisions in editing and cinematography may be motivated by the filmmaker’s intention of eliciting empathy. The goal of this s...

Social robots are increasingly used in an educational context. Research thus far shows promising results with regard to the effects of social robots in education in various tasks and various pupils. Social robots in the classroom are perceived as motivating, enjoyable, and engaging by the pupils, mostly in primary school. Variations in robots' comm...

Responding emotionally to a movie, video game, Instagram post, or a social robot is quite a common experience. Whereas the experience felt is real, the mediated encounter or message often is fabricated, just fiction, and involves artificial nonexistent characters. An intriguing question is thus “why does media use feel so real and how are emotions...

Robots are increasingly used in health care, in different forms and with promising results. The newest generation of human‐like communication robots is of most interest for media psychologists. This entry discusses how communication robots have been shown to keep senior citizens company, improve their mental and physical health, and reduce loneline...

Research shows promising results of educational robots in language and STEM tasks. In language, more research is available, occasionally in view of individual differences in pupils' educational ability levels, and learning seems to improve with more expressive robot behaviors. In STEM, variations in robots’ behaviors have been examined with inconcl...

Social robots in education introduce new moral challenges. The aim of this exploratory study is to gain a better understanding of the moral conceptions held by parents regarding the implementation of social robots in primary schools. These moral conceptions are important because parents are the representatives of children, but also experience the e...

Robot tutors provide new opportunities for education. However, they also introduce moral challenges. This study reports a systematic literature review (N = 256) aimed at identifying the moral considerations related to robots in education. While our findings suggest that robot tutors hold great potential for improving education, there are multiple v...

Sophistication of media technologies offers increasing possibilities for selective self-presentation online. However, how self-presentation affects well-being and body image is unclear. This systematic review aimed to map to what extent and under which circumstances types of self-presentation, versus lurking, support or hamper individuals’ well-bei...

This paper aims to chart the (moral) values from a robotic industry’s perspective regarding the introduction of robots in education. To our knowledge, no studies thus far have addressed this perspective in considering the moral values within this robotic domain. However, their values could conflict with the values upheld by other relevant stakehold...

This book is a timely and significant examination of the role of counter-messaging via social media as a potential means of preventing or countering radicalization to violent extremism. In recent years, extremist groups have developed increasingly sophisticated online communication strategies to spread their propaganda and promote their cause, enab...

To evaluate our emotionally intelligent software, we put a virtual human capable of speech and facial expressions to an updated and enriched version of the traditional Turing test. In a speed-date with 54 young females, either our software or human confederates controlled the simulation of the virtual human’s affective performance. Results were obt...

Background: There has been a rapid increase in the population of senior citizens in many countries. The shortage of caregivers is becoming a pressing concern. Robots are being deployed in an attempt to fill this gap and reduce the workload of caregivers. This study explores how healthcare robots are perceived by trainee care professionals. Methods:...

In this paper, we reflect on the implementation of a gamified application for helping students learn important facts about their study program. We focus on two design features, of which different configurations were tested in a field experiment among Dutch university students (N = 101). The first feature is feedback, which is expected to increase e...

Background: Older adults are a rapidly growing group world-wide, requiring an increasing amount of healthcare. Technological innovations such as care robots may support the growing demand for care. However, hardly any studies address those who will most closely collaborate with care robots: the (trainee) healthcare professional. Methods: This study...

This study presents the creation of a measurement device to determine and define sustainability attitudes into identifiable sustainability segments. These segments were profiled with behavioral and sociodemographic data. Based on previous literature, key sustainability topics were identified from which a 31-item questionnaire was developed, the Fiv...

Due to the enormous popularity of social networking sites (SNSs), online and offline social lives seem inextricably linked, which raises concerns for how SNS use relates to psychological health. Similarly, the omnipresence of selfies on SNSs—a form of appearance-related exposure—raises concerns regarding psychological health. This study aimed to in...

Peuters, kleuters en basisschoolkinderen kunnen zelfstandig met een robot werken aan concrete taken, zoals woorden leren, de tafels oefenen of een puzzel oplossen. Leerlingen leren van een robot die voorleest, vertelt, overhoort, uitlegt en met je oefent. Hoewel er al verschillende studies zijn gedaan naar robots met een sociale benadering, zoals h...

Although self-presentation has been studied for decades, social networking sites (SNS) such as Facebook have produced novel opportunities for visual online self-presentation. Posting selfies is currently a popular mode of consciously constructing visual online self-presentation, yet most prior research is limited to selfie posting alone. This study...

The urgent pressure on healthcare increases the need for understanding how new technology such as social robots may offer solutions. Many healthcare situations are emotionally charged, which likely affects people's perceptions of such robots in healthcare contexts. Thus far however, little attention has been paid to how people's prior emotions may...

The current generation of adolescents grows up in a media-saturated world. However, it is unclear how media influences the maturational trajectories of brain regions involved in social interactions. Here we review the neural development in adolescence and show how neuroscience can provide a deeper understanding of developmental sensitivities relate...

The present research developed a measure for exposure to both antisocial and prosocial media content by revising and extending a previous Content-based Media Exposure Scale (C-ME). The validity and reliability of the C-ME2 was tested in two independent samples (N = 678), among young adults (Study 1) and adolescents (Study 2). Results of Confirmator...

In this report, the authors examine the extent to which counter-narrative initiatives via social media can be effective in preventing people from radicalization or can de-radicalize people. Specifically, they formulate the following research questions: (1) How can we conceptualize narratives and counter-narratives? (2) How are narratives and cou...

Metaphors are often used to frame news. Different types of metaphor (conventional, novel) can affect issue viewpoint via different underlying mechanisms (cognitive and affective text perception). We conducted a single-factor (type of expression: conventional metaphor, novel metaphor, nonmetaphorical expression) between-subjects experiment with text...

Media's prevailing thin-body ideal plays a vital role in adolescent girls' body image development, but the co-occurring impact of peer feedback is understudied. The present study used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to test media imagery and peer feedback combinations on neural activity related to thin-body ideals. Twenty-four healthy...

Effects of metaphorical framing of political issues on opinion have been studied widely by two approaches: a critical-discourse approach (CDA) and a response-elicitation approach (REA). The current article reports a systematic literature review (N = 109) that examines whether these approaches report converging or diverging effects. We compared CDA...

In research covering media entertainment, media effects, and media psychology, many concepts denote the state of viewers in response to media personae in a way that resembles human–human interaction. One such concept is parasocial interaction (PSI). This entry positions PSI in its original academic context of the 1950s, when mass communication emer...

It is somewhat ironic that although youth today are saturated in media, no standardized instrument exists to measure individual’s exposure to specific media content. Therefore, we developed and validated a scale to measure both the frequency and content of adolescents’ media exposure which measures media exposure regardless of media channel: the Co...

Framing is an important concept in communication, yet many framing studies set out to develop frames relevant to only one issue. We expand framing theory by introducing figurative framing. We posit that figurative language types like metaphor, hyperbole and irony are important in shaping public discourse, because these figures contain important lin...

Victims of bullying tend to become cyberbullies themselves. The Cyclic Process Model describes the processes underlying the relationship between victimization and cyberbullying behavior. The current study examined whether all bullied adolescents experience these processes or that some bullied adolescents are more susceptible for these processes tha...

The verbal messages that contextualize exposure to idealized body imagery may moderate media users’ body satisfaction. Such contextualizing verbal messages often take the form of social comparison motives in fashion magazines, while body dissatisfaction is an important mechanism underlying various body image–related health issues like depression an...

Using emotional labor and conservation of resources (COR) theory, this diary study aims to gain insight into the role of daily strain in emotional labor and service performance on a day-to-day basis. Strain was taken into account both as an antecedent (at the start of the work shift), and as a consequence (at the end of the work shift) of emotional...

This entry covers the role of affect, mood, and emotions in exposure to media content. The influence of affect, mood, and emotions in media exposure on the impact of media is indisputable (Döveling et al. 2010; Konijn 2013). Formerly, the emphasis was largely on cognitive aspects such as recall, learning, thoughts, and beliefs. The affective aspect...

This entry covers the role of affect, mood, and emotions in exposure to media content. The influence of affect, mood, and emotions in media exposure on the impact of media is indisputable (Döveling et al. 2010; Konijn 2013). Formerly, the emphasis was largely on cognitive aspects such as recall, learning, thoughts, and beliefs. The affective aspect...

Science museums in Europe play an emerging and important role as brokers be- tween the public and policy-making institutions and are becoming platforms that enable scientific citizenship. To do so, museums rely on the participation of their visitors. However, little is known about the relation between visitors’ interest to par- ticipate, their enga...

The present paper argues that an important cause of publication bias resides in traditional frequentist statistics forcing binary decisions. An alternative approach through Bayesian statistics provides various degrees of support for any hypothesis allowing balanced decisions and proper null hypothesis testing, which may prevent publication bias. Te...

In the near future, human-like social robots will become indispensable for providing support in various social tasks, in particular for healthcare (e.g., assistance, coaching). The perception of realism, in particular human-like features, can help facilitate mediated social interaction. The current study investigated the effects of form realism on...

Rhetorical tropes like metaphors and irony are widely used in print advertising. Current advertising literature assumes that these different tropes (metaphor, irony) are persuasive when they are sufficiently novel and complex to increase advertising elaboration. However, we propose that, in some cases, tropes can also be persuasive when they presen...

Science centres and museums in Europe traditionally offer opportunities for public participation, such as dialogues, debates and workshops. In recent years, starting with the support of grants from the European Commission, the purpose of these initiatives is increasingly more connected with the policy making processes where science centres play a r...

In healthcare, the number of patients is increasing while available staff declines. Technology such as social robots becomes a likely solution for providing care. Realism plays an important role in how these social robots are perceived. We designed Polygon, a robot with a minimal amount of realism to explore whether it is possible to yield acceptab...