Karin Fikkers

Utrecht University | UU · Utrecht Institute of Linguistics OTS (UiL OTS)

This study investigated the role of a social context variable, perceived peer norms, in the relationship between media violence exposure and adolescents’ aggressive behavior. This was informed by a need to better understand whether, how, and for whom media violence exposure may affect aggression. Three hypotheses were tested with peer norms as mode...

Despite the crucial role of humor in t(w)eens’ media entertainment, we lack a theoretically informed approach to investigate the prevalence and co-occurrence of humor types in such entertainment. Therefore, this study tested a coding framework of humor in t(w)eens’ media entertainment by content-analyzing 107 television series (5,633 scenes) listed...

Cognitive, emotional, and arousal responses to media content stem from two sources of variation: differences in content and differences between individuals. Although the first source of variation (content effects) has been well-studied, individual differences (person effects) in responses to media are investigated much less within communication sci...

The effect of teens’ exposure to televised aggression depends on the characteristics of the viewer and the portrayed aggression. However, few studies have investigated which teens prefer what forms of televised aggression. Therefore, this study investigated how teens’ trait aggression and sex guide their preferences for types (physical, verbal, and...

This study investigated the longitudinal relationship between children’s digital game use and fluid and crystallized intelligence. Specifically, this study examined whether digital games affect children’s fluid and crystallized intelligence (an effects perspective), whether children with higher levels of fluid or crystallized intelligence are more...

This two-wave survey study investigated the concurrent and longitudinal relationships between different styles of restrictive and active parental mediation (autonomy-supportive, controlling, or inconsistent), adolescents’ media violence exposure, and aggression. Our sample consisted of 1,029 adolescents (10 to 14 years; 49.8% girls). Results indica...

This study evaluated whether common self-report measures of television and game violence exposure represent reliable and valid measurement tools. Three self-report measures – direct estimates, user-rated favorites, and agency-rated favorites – were assessed in terms of test-retest reliability, criterion validity (their relationship with coded media...

Fictional narratives can have strong effects on people's real world opinions, attitudes, and behavior. Given the far-reaching implications these effects may have, understanding when and how narratives can have such effects is important. One frequent claim about narrative impact is that stories can disable people's ability to critically evaluate the...

We investigated how exposure to media violence and family conflict affects adolescents' subsequent aggressive behavior. We expected a double dose effect, meaning that high media violence exposure would lead to higher levels of aggression for adolescents in high conflict families compared to low conflict families. A total of 499 adolescents (aged 10...

In this paper, we use logistic regression modelling to predict the English benefactive al- ternation (He baked me a cake vs. He baked a cake for me). We developed a data set consisting of 107 instances in adult writing and 36 in the writing of 8-to-12-year-olds, and annotated them with 13 syntactic, semantic and discourse features. We show that a m...