Nicole Martins

Indiana University Bloomington | IUB · Department of Telecommunications

The goal of this study was to apply insights from social identity gratifications and ethnic/racial identity development frameworks to better understand how adolescents perceive, select, and avoid media content which has the potential to damage self-and group-concept. We conducted focus groups with 32 Latino adolescents aged 13 to 15. We found mixed...

This article provides a 20-year, apples-to-apples update of the National Television Violence Studies. Using the same sampling procedures and codebook, we coded 765 primetime television programs and movies airing on 21 broadcast and cable networks. Results suggest the prevalence of violence has increased slightly, but the number of programs saturate...

This study provides a comprehensive update investigating the amount and nature of violence contained in primetime television programming that targets children aged 17 and younger. Using the same sampling procedures and codebook as the original National Television Violence Study, we coded 765 primetime television programs airing on 21 broadcast and...

Anxiety is common among food allergic children. Various factors contribute to these feelings of fear and anxiety, including management of multiple allergens, a child’s previous anaphylactic reaction, daily food allergy management, and fear of fatalities.1,2 Despite their relative rarity,3 the risk of fatal allergic reactions is a common source of a...

Scholars have extensively studied video game labor practices (e.g., Bulut, E. (2015). Glamor above, precarity below: Immaterial labor in the video game industry. Critical Studies in Media Communication, 32(3), 193-207. https://doi.org/10.1080/15295036.2015.1047880 , Bulut, E. (2020). White masculinity, creative desires, and production ideology in v...

Most research on the media use of children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) focuses on media device use and less on content preferences of these children. We interviewed parents (N = 31) of children with ASD to examine parental observations of their children’s audiovisual media content preferences. Thematic analysis of the in-depth interviews fo...

The majority of the existing research on media aggression has focused on media violence and its effects on physical aggression. However, scholars have recently focused their attention on other forms of aggression in the media, such as social aggression, and its effects on viewer attitudes and behaviors. Indeed, several content analyses now show tha...

A survey was conducted with low income Latina teens (M = 13.31 years of age) to examine the ways in which exposure, identification with, and social comparison to teen mothers featured on the MTV program Teen Mom influenced attitudes toward teen pregnancy. Analyses revealed that those who identified with and looked up to the teen mothers on Teen Mom...

Although the predictors of off-line relational aggression have been examined in prior work, less is known about the factors that contribute to online relational aggression perpetration and victimization. This study examined parental restrictive and active mediation of teenagers’ social media use as potential predictors of these outcomes. We were pa...

We conducted a meta-analysis of 33 studies that examined the effects of media exposure on relationally aggressive behaviors and cognitions (a total of 66 effect sizes, N = (20,990). Across all types of aggressive content, there was a small positive effect (r = 0.15) on relational aggression. However, a comparison of effects sizes demonstrate that e...

Perceptions of fertility are thought to impact reproductive behaviors, yet little is known about how lay people conceptualize the female fertility timeline. In this research, public perception of the female fertility timeline was assessed via a national survey of U.S. adults (N = 990) ranging in age from 18 to 89 years. Although there is no scienti...

News articles about media effects research were presented to 333 participants to experimentally test the effects of three independent variables on perceived credibility of both the journalist and featured scientist: whether the sources in the news story supported or contradicted the findings of the featured scientist, journalist gender, and whether...

The majority of the existing research on media aggression has focused on media violence and its effects on physical aggression. However, more recently, scholars have focused their attention on other forms of aggression in the media, such as relational aggression, and its effects on viewer attitudes and behaviors. This chapter reviews the existing t...

Exposure to televised relational aggression can negatively influence youths’ well-being. Research shows that parent–child interactions about media – parental mediation – can alter children’s responses to media exposure. Therefore, this study explored the relation between US parents’ perceptions of relational aggression in the media, parental mediat...

This study investigated whether streetstyle blogs provide an alternative to the thin-ideal found in traditional media. We analyzed images of 481 individuals from 5 streetstyle blogs. The majority of women (72%) and men (62%) were coded as below-average weight. Most women (60%) positioned themselves in accordance with Goffman’s gender-role stereotyp...

This study examined sexual content in American prime-time programs popular among the tween (ages 9-to-14) audience on broadcast networks and programs aired on the most popular adolescent TV networks?an understudied area of media research. Consistent with past research, the majority of broadcast shows contained sexual talk and behaviors, as did adol...

Leisure reading behavior is a key predictor of educational success. Transportability is a trait that determines how likely an individual is to become involved in a story, and past research has suggested that involvement may be related to leisure reading behavior. However, available measures of transportability have not been validated with children...

This study examined young viewers’ evaluations of the social and physical aggression that is endemic in tween sitcoms. Preadolescents (N = 176) were randomly assigned to watch a tween sitcom that featured a protagonist or antagonist committing social or physical aggression (two exemplars at each level). As suggested by recent work on disposition th...

A content analysis of the MTV shows 16 and Pregnant (n = 59), Teen Mom (n = 20), and Teen Mom 2 (n = 20) was conducted to determine whether these programs accurately portray teen pregnancy. The results revealed that teen mothers on 16 and Pregnant were younger, more often White, and had more healthy babies as compared to national averages. The babi...

The relationship between children’s TV consumption and literacy outcomes is currently unclear, as past research has identified both linear and curvilinear trends. One explanation for the contradictory results is the varying content children consume; specifically, researchers have argued that research-based educational TV programming should be posit...

This study examined parental mediation of children’s video game play in an Internet survey of 433 parents of children aged 5 to 18 years. We assessed the valence of active mediation (i.e., positive, negative, neutral) and the relationship between parental involvement and mediation techniques. Furthermore, we explored whether parental mediation was...

Social cognitive theory suggests that stereotypes of attractiveness from mainstream media may function as models for online profile pictures. The present study explores the relationship between media consumption, internalization, and body-ism, clothing, and gaze through a content analysis of the Facebook profile pictures of 288 students, and a surv...

This study presents the results of a survey of 269 undergraduate students conducted to examine fright experiences caused by video games. Over half of the participants reported game-induced fear. Sex, sensation-seeking, and empathy all emerged as important individual differences in terms of enjoyment of frightening content, consumption of frightenin...

A survey was conducted with U.S. high school students (M =16.57 years of age) from the Midwest to examine whether exposure to ‘‘teen mom’’ reality programming (e.g., 16 and Pregnant, Teen Mom) was related to teens’ perceptions of teen parenthood. Contrary to our hypotheses, analyses revealed that exposure to teen mom reality programming was related...

We conducted a content analysis of news articles (N = 540) to examine whether news coverage of media violence accurately reflects scientific knowledge about exposure to media violence and its effects on viewer aggression. The analysis revealed that over the past 30 years, news articles generally suggested that a link between media violence and aggr...

A content analysis was conducted to examine the portrayal of social aggression in the 50 most popular television programs among 2‐ to 11‐year‐old children. Results revealed that 92% of the programs in the sample contained some social aggression. On average, there were 14 different incidents of social aggression per hour in these shows, or one every...

This study explores the personal experience of pro-ana bloggers, members of an online community for people with eating disorders. Using Erving Goffman's work on stigma, this study explores the motivations, benefits, and drawbacks of blogging about a stigmatized mental illness, as taken from the bloggers' own perceptive. We conducted 33 interviews w...

A longitudinal panel survey of 396 White and Black preadolescent boys and girls was conducted to assess the long-term effects of television consumption on global self-esteem. The results revealed television exposure, after controlling for age, body satisfaction, and baseline self-esteem, was significantly related to children’s self-esteem. Specific...

A survey was conducted with over 500 children in grades K-5 to examine whether exposure to socially aggressive content was related to children's use of social aggression. The results of the survey revealed a significant relationship between exposure to televised social aggression and increased social aggression at school, but only for girls and not...

We conducted a random telephone survey of 182 parents to assess how they communicate with their children about kidnapping stories featured in the news. Three different strategies emerged. Some parents warned their children, signaling to them that kidnappings are likely to occur. Other parents reassured their children, suggesting that such threats r...

A content analysis was conducted to examine the amount and nature of social aggression across genres of programming popular among 2- to 11-year-old children. Results reveal that the reality programming genre is systematically different from the other 3 genres in terms of the amount and context of social aggression. Findings are discussed in terms o...

It is widely assumed that children like violence in cartoons, but this assumption has not been supported in existing studies that show nonviolent programs are liked just as much or more than violent programs. The present experiment extended enjoyment of media violence research by testing whether violence and action (independently manipulated) influ...

The 150 top-selling video games sold in the U.S. across nine platforms were content analyzed to study representations of female bodies. All human females in the games were captured via screenshot and body parts measured. These measurements were then compared to actual anthropometric data drawn from a representative sample of 3,000 American women. T...

A large-scale content analysis of characters in video games was employed to answer questions about their representations of gender, race and age in comparison to the US population. The sample included 150 games from a year across nine platforms, with the results weighted according to game sales. This innovation enabled the results to be analyzed in...

Although violent video game content and its effects have been examined extensively by empirical research, verbal aggression in the form of profanity has received less attention. Building on preliminary findings from previous studies, an extensive content analysis of profanity in video games was conducted using a sample of the 150 top-selling video...

A communication-debilitating illness or injury (CDI) presents significant challenges for patients as well as for friends and family. In a qualitative study of the effects of a CDI on close relationships, 28 individuals with loved ones who had experienced a CDI were interviewed. Participants described adjustments in communication with the patient an...

We conducted a random telephone survey of 182 parents to assess their reactions as well as their children's reactions to child kidnapping stories in the news. Children below age 13 experienced more fright-related feelings and more concern for their personal safety than adolescents did. Children who were heavy viewers of TV news also were more frigh...