Lewen Wei

UNSW Sydney | UNSW · School of the Arts & Media

Carousel advertisements (ads) on social media provide consumers with the opportunity to scroll left and right when reading an ad’s content. Such an interactive advertising format has great potential to elevate consumers’ interactive and engagement experience with ads, which might be further linked with increased advertising effectiveness. The prese...

A favorable reputation casts positive influences over organizations' short-and long-term development, which can be especially important when organizations grapple with unpredictable challenges such as organizational crises. Yet, keeping a good track record might also backfire to cause more reputational damages, which is often observed when organiza...

Theories and research in human–machine communication (HMC) suggest that machines, when replacing humans as communication partners, change the processes and outcomes of communication. With artificial intelligence (AI) increasingly used to interview and evaluate job applicants, employers should consider the effects of AI on applicants’ psychology and...

Maintaining satisfying close relationships is important for individuals’ well-being. In the digital age, artificial intelligence (AI) has growing applications for relationship maintenance and thus implications for relational well-being. We hypothesize that although using AI to help with relational maintenance may reduce an individual’s effort, thei...

Relationship maintenance needs sincere efforts made by both self and relational partners. Yet, technological development provides people with convenient access to help from external sources-other people online, or even tools powered by artificial intelligence (AI)-when performing certain relational activities. By reducing personal effort, receiving...

With prominent looming global issues such as climate change and COVID-19, public understanding of science (PUS) is increasingly perceived to be vital for humanity to address and adapt to global wicked challenges. Compared to conventional approaches that struggle with public engagement, games can potentially remedy this by proactively engaging playe...

Negative user-generated contents on social media can result in detrimental impact on organizational reputation should a crisis occurs. In the present study, we sought to examine the effectiveness of implementing pre-crisis inoculation and increasing midst-crisis organizational interactivity on bolstering crisis management outcomes. Through a three-...

Storifying gameful designs helps to engage players with desirable behavioral implications via enhanced narrative experience, the benefits of which are particularly prominent for developing serious mobile games to overcome their technical and contextual constraints. To understand the multifaceted nature of players’ narrative engagement with storifie...

Research outlets are increasingly adopting the Open Data policy—requiring or encouraging researchers to release data publicly. However, public data sharing in the digital age may threaten participants' privacy and thereby discourage participants to disclose. We tested this possibility and explored solutions with a between-subjects online experiment...

Green consumerism is a growing trend that may contribute to a more sustainable society. However, lack of motivation to pursue a green lifestyle might subject consumers to well-documented moral licensing effects. Moreover, individuals with conservative ideological leanings are also less predisposed to take environmentally friendly actions, suggestin...

The success of video streaming social networking sites (e.g., YouTube) is reliant upon savvy integration of advertising into massive amounts of user-generated content. These sites must weigh when, where, and how much advertising should be utilized to increase profit without causing irritation. This study examined two key variables related to stream...

Digital platforms increasingly use online behavioral targeting (OBT) to enhance consumers' engagement, which involves using algorithms to “gaze” at consumers—tracking their online activities and inferring their preferences—so as to deliver relevant, personalized messages (e.g., advertisements, recommendations) to consumers. In light of the rising c...

This study examined the effects of stated motives in post-crisis corporate social responsibility (CSR) messages, CSR-crisis issue congruence, and pre-crisis corporate engagement on public skepticism toward CSR and subsequent corporate evaluations. We conducted a 3 (motive of post-crisis CSR initiative: no statement vs. firm-serving vs. public-servi...

Purpose The study sought to explore how people's negative emotions change in a crisis situation when they get to know about the crisis and the corporate's socially responsible activities after crisis. Design/methodology/approach A 2 (crisis type: human error vs organization misdeed) × 2 (CSR fit: low vs high) × 3 (motive disclosure: no disclosure...

Continuous tracking of information is critical for meaningful self-reflection and self-monitoring, but people often forget to log their information in tracking devices. Research indicates that tracking reminders can successfully remind people to log their information, yet, little is known about what make reminders (in)effective. We extend prior wor...

This position paper aims to initiate a dialogue among HCI researchers about the current research and future directions on anthropomorphism in implementing health virtual coaches. We summarize key research trends on anthropomorphized virtual coaches and present three future directions on this area that expand on and address gaps from previous studie...

The present study intends to examine environmental corporate social responsibility (ECSR) disclosure on official corporate websites within and across a collection of companies. Through an automated content analysis, the findings suggest two broad themes underlying corporate disclosure, and significant associations between personal pronoun usage/lex...

Social media has become a popular venue for support seeking, which often involves self-disclosure about one's misfortune. To examine how help-related emotions and cognitions as responses to such disclosure might be influenced by technological factors, we conducted a 2 (interpersonal similarity: low vs. high) x 3 (message publicness: private vs. mod...

Emotions are non-negligible parts of the experience among the cancer-affected population to be reckoned with. With the increasing usage of social media platforms as venues for emotional disclosure, we ask the question, what and how are the emotions of the cancer community being shared there? Using a deep learning model and social network analysis,...

Targeted advertising promises to increase relevance to consumers , but risks backfiring if it seems overly intrusive. In the present study, we examined whether personalizing online advertisements based on one's autobiographical memory can foster positive reactions toward the advertisement. In two experiments, participants went through a fictitious...

This study explored the effect of incorporating danmaku, a website feature that allows viewers’ comments to scroll on top of videos while streaming videos online, into advertising. Through a 2 (danmaku: absence vs. presence) x 2 (ad type: non-humor vs. humor) x 2 (comment type: not cueing humor vs. cueing humor) online experiment, we found conditio...

Instagram users can create two types of account to manage their self-presentation strategically. On a real Instagram account (known as Rinsta), users highlight flattering aspects of self, whereas on a fake Instagram account (known as Finsta), users show unflattering aspects of self. We conducted an online survey with college Instagram users who use...

Do users’ general social support preference influence their satisfaction with embodied conversational agents’ (ECAs) social support? We examined this research question by conducting a 2 (an agent’s social support: informational vs. emotional) x 2 (a user’s general social support needs: informational vs. emotional) between-subjects online experiment...

News-writing bots have been applied in news production. However, findings remain equivocal about how machine authorship is received by readers. To understand the inconsistency in past findings, this study conducted a 2 (purported writer: human vs. machine) × 2 (news organization: the New York Times vs. Fox News) × 2 (news type: spot news vs. interp...

Media psychology literature suggests that both celebrity and peer endorsers can be effective in persuasion when taking certain bodily addressing styles but via different mechanisms. To understand the psychological mechanisms underlying audiences’ reactions toward print public service announcements (PSAs) and to design effective PSAs accordingly, we...

This study examined the effect of adding an emotion regulation feature into fitness trackers. Applying the theoretical framework of emotion regulation, we argue that such feature can mitigate tracker users’ downward emotions due to failure to meet their fitness goals, and as such, the users would be continuously motivated to meet their fitness goal...

Research has suggested social media might not be an ideal place to get social support. This study examined how publicness of support seeking might influence the quantity and quality of received support by testing six potential underlying mechanisms. We conducted a 3 (publicness: private, medium, public) X 2 (problem severity: mild vs. severe) betwe...