Helena Bilandzic

• University of Augsburg

During the COVID-19 pandemic, scientific information served as the basis for political decisions and individual actions. We argue that in such large-scale emergencies, audiences seek more than information: they seek trusted individuals, like scientists and public-health experts, who have expertise in relevant areas. Celebrity scientists are mediate...

Public discussions of controversial science fields like COVID-19 or climate science increasingly address inner-scientific structures and the norms guiding the scientific system—aspects that are normally discussed within the scientific community. However, not much is known about the endorsement of scientific norms by non-scientists and how those end...

This handbook offers a comprehensive overview of the subjects and theories related to reception research. In 37 contributions, the questions and subjects of the discipline are presented, the current state of research is analysed and an outlook on open questions is given. The contributions thus provide a systematic approach to the state of research...

Das Handbuch bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über die Gegenstände und Theorien der Rezeptionsforschung. In den 37 Beiträgen wird ein systematischer Zugang zum State of the Art der jeweiligen Thematik aus einer kommunikationswissenschaftlichen Perspektive gelegt. Die umfassend aktualisierte und erweiterte 2. Auflage befasst sich in vier Teilen: (...

This study investigates public perceptions of trustworthiness and authenticity regarding scientists engaged in controversial and less controversial fields with a cross-sectional survey of a German sample (“N” = 1007). Results indicate that scientists in controversial fields like COVID-19 or climate change are perceived as less trustworthy and authe...

Zusammenfassung In contemporary digitalized media environments, the interaction between technologies and user practices can lead to polarization, fragmentation, and radicalization of the media discourse. We argue that these issues require efforts to strengthen ‘discursive resilience’, which we define as the capacity of the discourse on digital plat...

This study examines the effect of Value-Based Framing (egoistic, altruistic, and biospheric) in the context of a poster campaign on plastic pollution. Norm-Activation Theory (Schwartz, 1977) serves as a theoretical background to describe the environmental behavior formation process. In line with Schwartz (1992; 1994), the different types of Value-B...

Background Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a common cardiovascular disease and health literacy is necessary to deal with its consequences after the acute event. The aim of this study was to develop and validate a new questionnaire to measure PE-specific health literacy. Methods A mixed-methods design with qualitative and quantitative elements was used...

The Covid‐19 pandemic has been accompanied by an excess of accurate and inaccurate information (infodemic) that has prevented people from finding reliable guidance in decision‐making. Non‐professional but popular science communicators —some with a political agenda—supply the public with scientific knowledge regarding Covid‐19. This kind of communic...

Die folgende Studie untersucht die Wirkung von werteorientiertem Framing (Value-Based Framing) auf Einstellung zum Klimawandel und klimawandelbezogener Verhaltensintention von Rezipierenden. In einem Between-Subject Online-Experiment rezipierten je 40 Teilnehmende (18-53 Jahre) entweder einen Zeitungsartikel mit selbsttranszendentem Framing (altrui...

Objective Pulmonary embolism (PE) is the third most common cardiovascular disease worldwide. However, public awareness is considerably lower than for myocardial infarction or stroke. Patients suffering from PE complain about the lack of (understandable) information and express high informational needs. To uncover if reliable information is indeed s...

We propose to extend the theoretical concept of eudaimonia as a media effect with critical thinking as a mind-set effect. Critical thinking as a mind-set effect means that media narratives can stimulate viewers and readers to think critically in any situation, even outside of the exposure situation and applied to other topics. It denotes a generall...

The inclusion of narratives in evidence-based patient information is a heavily discussed topic in literature. Narratives elicit intense engagement and emotional insights, but may also cause unintended persuasion effects. There is mixed evidence that adding narratives to non-narrative factual patient information is valuable for patients. In addition...

This research examines the effects of responsibility attributions and descriptive norms in media messages on climate mitigation intentions. In study 1, we manipulate whether responsibility is attributed to the individual or the government, compared to no attributions at all. In study 2, the effect of descriptive normative information following indi...

Zusammenfassung Hintergrund Die Anzahl an Patienten in Notaufnahmen steigt seit Jahren an. Im Besonderen wächst der Anteil an Patienten mit einem nichtdringlichen Behandlungsbedarf. Bislang ist unklar, ob dies in Deutschland auch auf eine eingeschränkte Gesundheitskompetenz zurückgeführt werden kann. Ziel der Arbeit Ziel der Studie war es, die Ge...

An increasing amount of fictional films, books or television series address themes of sustainability. This chapter defines fictional sustainability narratives and provides an overview about existing research. First, studies analyzing the content of fictional sustainable books and films are summarized. Second, we shed light on existing audience effe...

The current article tests the metacognitive proposition that the relative ease or difficulty with which narrative messages are processed can affect subsequent judgment. Challenging the assertion that experienced disfluency is mostly negative and undesirable, it is argued that disfluent (difficult-to-process) narratives are well-positioned to facili...

Stories have long been discussed as a tool to make science accessible to the public. The potential of stories to stimulate emotions in their audiences makes them an emotional communication strategy par excellence . While studies exist that test the effects of stories in science communication on the one hand and the effects of emotions on the other...

Using an integration of Norm Activation Theory, Value-Belief-Norm Theory and Narrative Persuasion, this study investigates the ability of an eco-dystopian science fiction film set in a world of excessive solar radiation to support intentions for pro-environmental behavior. Specifically, the influence of narrative engagement and explicit references...

The aim of this study was to gain a better understanding of how fictional television shapes people’s expectations about the moral workings of the real world, relying on cultivation theory, and models of narrative and moral effects as theoretical frameworks. Using a cross-sectional sample of the general German adult population, this study investigat...

This study adds to existing research on liking of anti-heroes by demonstrating the importance of perceived interaction and identification on character liking. Our first experiment used a televised series (House of Cards) as the narrative context, and the second study employed a written narrative. In both experiments, versions featuring the main cha...

Evidence has become a key resource within our knowledge society. At the same time, during the course of the 20th century, negotiations on the validity of knowledge became a political and controversial phenomenon which has since shaped the multiple fields of science, technology, politics, medicine and society. As the diagnosis of a ‘post-factual age...

Whereas parasocial experience is conceptualized as imagined interaction identification is defined as the merging of one’s identity with a character’s. Thus, having a character face the camera and directly address viewers should increase the sense of parasocial experience but not affect the intensity of identification. An experiment compared the lev...

Narrative health communication is a form of persuasive communication in which a health message is presented in the form of a fictional or nonfictional story, as opposed to being presented as statistical evidence or arguments to promote health-related behaviors. Recently, meta-analyses have been conducted on the effectiveness of narrative health com...

Narrative Absorption brings together research from the social sciences and Humanities to solve a number of mysteries: Most of us will have had those moments, of being totally absorbed in a book, a movie, or computer game. Typically we do not have any idea about how we ended up in such a state. Nor do we fully realize how we might have changed as we...

This study explores the potential of television genres to cultivate different types of moral reasoning. In a prolonged exposure experiment, participants (N = 121) were exposed to video material from 1 of 3 genres (crime, medical drama, comedy) over the course of 4 weeks. Using the Neo-Kohlbergian approach (Rest et al., 1999a), the study measured ef...

This study explores discrete emotions (guilt, fear, hope) as mediators for effects of goal framing on perceived threat of climate change and willingness to sacrifice. To reconcile conflicting evidence, the study introduces and tests the distinction between gain-positive frames (positive consequences of engaging in climate protection), gain-negative...

In a quantitative content analysis, social norm violations and their narrative context are analyzed in 225 episodes of 15 television series of four popular television genres (crime drama, medical drama, sitcom, and daily soap). Extending previous studies, the authors’ results indicate that aggressive norm violations are only a fraction of all norm...

Flow is a state sustained by intrinsic motivation that describes the desirable experience of being completely immersed in an activity (→ Involvement with Media Content), during which other stimuli present in the surroundings are not attended to (Csikszentmihalyi 1988).

Flow is a state sustained by intrinsic motivation that describes the desirable experience of being completely immersed in an activity (→ Involvement with Media Content), during which other stimuli present in the surroundings are not attended to (Csikszentmihalyi 1988).

This study investigated the validity of the narrative engagement scale (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2009) by grounding the dimensions of the scale in relationships between self-reported narrative engagement and embodied mental processes occurring during exposure. Psychophysiological measures were used to observe real-time variation in mental processes ac...

Dieses Lehrbuch bietet einen kompakten und theoretisch fundierten Einstieg in die wichtigsten Ansätze der kommunikationswissenschaftlichen Rezeptionsforschung. Im Mittelpunkt steht das Individuum, das sich einem Medium zuwendet und es nutzt – die dabei ablaufenden kognitiven, emotionalen und verhaltensbezogenen Aspekte werden systematisiert und anh...

The full text is available here: http://www.dgpuk.de/meine-dgpuk/aus-dem-verein/info-broschuren/

Questioning and rejecting the scientific consensus on climate change causes, climate skeptics argue that climate science is involved in a global conspiracy, guided by self-interest and aspirations of societal change. On the basis of 97 climate skeptical non-fiction books, this article reconstructs the logical structure of climate skeptical (or deni...

Das „Handbuch Medienrezeption“ bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über die Gegenstände und Theorien der Rezeptionsforschung. In 26 Beiträgen namhafter Rezeptionsforscherinnen und -forscher werden die Fragestellungen und Gegenstände der Disziplin vorgestellt, der Stand der Forschung aufbereitet und ein Ausblick auf offene Fragen gegeben. Die Beiträg...

Fiktionale Geschichten und ihre Wirkungen auf die Wahrnehmung der politischn und sozialen Realität / Matthias R. Hastall ; Freya Sukalla ; Helena Bilandzic. - In: Politische Unterhaltung, unterhaltende Politik / Marco Dohle ... (Hrsg.). - Köln : von Halem, 2014. - S. 294-314. - (Unterhaltungsforschung ; 8)

Wirkungsforschung. - In: Kommunikationswissenschaft als Integrationsdisziplin : Martin Karmasin ... (Hrsg.). - Wiesbaden : Springer VS, 2014. - S. 159-178

Immersion. - In: Handbuch Medienrezeption / Carsten Wünsch ... [Hrsg.]. - Baden-Baden : Nomos, 2014. - S. 273-290

The chapter aims to illuminate the relationship between the condition of permanent transformation of audiences (and technological media landscape) and the social formations called “generations”. The chapter is based on the idea that “generational identity” or “generational belonging”, based on social relationships (mediated or not), define the so...

Mehrmethodendesigns gelten in der empirischen Forschung als ein Erfolgsfaktor für eine hohe Qualität der Datenerhebung. Grund dafür ist ihr Potenzial, Forschungsperspektiven inhaltlich zu ergänzen, methodische Defizite zu kompensieren und Messungen zu validieren. In der Forschungspraxis werden sie jedoch vergleichsweise selten angewandt: Die hohe K...

Narrativer Journalismus, narrative Wirkungen. - In: Medien und Journalismus im 21. Jahrhundert : [Heinz Pürer zum 65. Geburtstag] / Nina Springer ... (Hg.). - Konstanz u.a. : UVK-Verl.-Ges., 2012. - S. 467-487

This study investigates the relations between narrative experiences (transportation, identification, immersion and telepresence) and film enjoyment, and explores the possibility that transportability (the disposition for narrative experience) and perceived realism facilitate narrative experience and indirectly influence enjoyment. The study measure...

This contribution reflects content and effects of moral messages in media from a narrative perspective. Building on Tamborini’s (2011) Model of Moral Intuition and Media Enjoyment, several issues are raised: First, the difficulty of conceptually and empirically defining “morality” in media entertainment is elaborated. Several options of moral ambig...

This expanded collection of new and fully revised explorations of media content identifies the ways we all have been negatively stereotyped and demonstrates how careful analysis of media portrayals can create more beneficial alternatives. Not all damaging stereotypes are obvious. In fact, the pictorial stereotypes in the media that we don't notice...

Flow is a state sustained by intrinsic motivation that describes the desirable experience of being completely immersed in an activity (→ Involvement with Media Content), during which other stimuli present in the surroundings are not attended to (Csikszentmihalyi 1988).

Research indicates that the extent to which one becomes engaged, transported, or immersed in a narrative influences the narrative's potential to affect subsequent story-related attitudes and beliefs. Explaining narrative effects and understanding the mechanisms responsible depends on our ability to measure narrative engagement in a theoretically me...

The concept of transportation into narrative (Green & Brock, 2002) is used to gain new insights into cultivation processes. A theoretical framework is developed where cultivation is seen as the result of a self-reinforcing interaction between persuasive and motivational effects of transportation: Repeated highly transportive experiences contribute...

This article offers a theoretical framework to explain circumstances under which perceptions of "unrealness" affect engagement in narratives and subsequent perceived realism judgments. A mental models approach to narrative processing forms the foundation of a model that integrates narrative comprehension and phenomenological experiences such as tra...

An expanding media universe confronts readers, viewers, and users with an abundance of media content that, for the most part, will not be used by the audience, and will, in many cases, not even be considered for use. Selecting what to use and not to use is functional in avoiding information overload (Carlson, 2003) or ‘technostress’ (Rosen and Weil...

This article proposes an integrative theoretical perspective of the cultivation process, starting from the notion that subjective social reality is organized in “zones of relevance,” with some social elements being closer, and some more remote, to an individual’s everyday life (L. P. Berger & T. Luckmann, 1967; A. Schutz, 1970b). Media effects are...

Die empirische Unterhaltungsforschung beschäftigt sich seit nunmehr über 20 Jahren intensiv mit folgenden Fragen: Welche Medienangebote werden von welchen Personen unter welchen Bedingungen unterhaltend empfunden? Ist Unterhaltung eine Rezeptions- oder eine Angebotskategorie? Welche Faktoren auf Seiten des Medienangebots einerseits und der Rezipien...

There is a substantial body of empirical evidence that narrative messages are influen-tial in changing attitudes and beliefs of the audience. Narratives allow for a specific reading or viewing experience: They transport their recipients into the narrative world, involving them cognitively and emotionally. The role of the text, however, generally re...

The basic assumption of cultivation - more exposure to television leads to more cultivation effects - is examined by reviewing research on genre-specific cultivation. Studies on three genres are included in the review: Crime, soap opera and talk shows. The review indicates differential cultivation effects of the different genres; not all of them ar...

Zusammenfassung. Die Studie geht von zwei kontraintuitiven Befunden zur Kultivierung aus: Die Nutzung von Krimis hat einen geringeren Einfluss auf Kultivierung als das Gesamtfernsehen; aktive Rezeption schwacht Kultivierungseffekte ab. Shrum (1995) nimmt an, dass Fernsehinformationen nur dann in Ansichten uber die reale Welt einfliesen, wenn die Qu...