Shannon Cruz

Pennsylvania State University | Penn State · Department of Communication Arts and Sciences

Message fatigue is the aversive motivational state that results from excessive exposure to campaign messages or similar information over an extended period of time. When fatigued, individuals become less attentive, less responsive, and more resistant to campaign messages and related information. Thus, understanding the bases and functioning of fati...

Environmental nonprofits (ENPOs) play vital roles in addressing environmental problems. To succeed, ENPOs must be adept at developing and maintaining successful partnerships with businesses, government agencies, and other NPOs. Even though evidence suggests ENPOs rely on these partnerships more than NPOs in other cause areas, however, relatively fe...

Efforts by universities to reduce the spread of COVID-19 include health campaigns intended to encourage students to wear masks. While well-intended, these efforts may produce counter-persuasion (e.g., decrease masking) if they are seen as threatening individuals’ freedom to choose. In a rolling cross-sectional study of one university campaign (n =...

Building support for fighting climate change via public policy requires overcoming motivated resistance based on political identities. One solution is for sources, congenial to the audience's political orientation, to advocate such policies. This study explores explanations suggested by the self-concept model of cognitive dissonance and the extent...

Growing concern about the seriousness of issues such as climate change has made the value of research on social and behavioral aspects of environmental problems clearer than ever. For authors studying environmental concern or attitudes, however, survey development can be a daunting task. A large number of scales measuring environmental concern have...

Community engagement is a vital aspect of addressing environmental contamination and remediation. In the United States, the Superfund Research Program (SRP) forms groups of academic researchers from the social and physical sciences into Community Engagement Cores (CECs) and Research Translation Cores (RTCs), which focus on various aspects of inform...

Loss of property value is a major concern in communities faced with the toxic byproducts of industrial practices. Even after site remediation, stigma may persist and negatively affect market values of residential properties. To study the effects of contamination and of remediation on property values in Midland, Michigan, where dioxins have been rel...

The articles in this special issue on New Directions in Environmental Communication in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health present new research and perspectives on engaging communities impacted by Superfund sites—the hazardous waste sites that have been identified by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) a...

As it becomes increasingly urgent to address climate change, scholars have begun to explore how attitudes toward climate change are shaped, including the influence of messages people hear in the context of the ongoing climate change debate. What has not yet been addressed, however, is how these arguments might be affecting not only climate change a...

Executive Summary This study assesses the state of the evidence about Project ECHO (Extension for Community Healthcare Outcomes) and suggests directions for improving its performance in the field. As sometimes happens in the diffusion of a promising intervention, the state of the art-what practitioners are doing in the field-can outrun the state of...

Trust is generally recognized as important for risk-relevant behavior but research suggests that trust in different organizations may have varying effects. This research advances the literature by testing two hypotheses which postulate that this variability can be explained by risk perception. We collected data from 351 anglers regarding their trus...

This study reports the results of two meta-analyses investigating the relationships between environmental concern and both political party affiliation and political ideology. Political party affiliation was found to have a substantial association with environmental concern (ρ = 0.22), as was political ideology (ρ = 0.27). Both relationships could a...

This article examined the extent to which residents living in the Midland–Saginaw–Bay City area in Eastern Michigan felt stigmatized due to industrial contamination. Seventy in-depth interviews were conducted with local residents, focusing on the extent to which they experienced three aspects of stigma—affective, cognitive, and behavioral. Results...

Meta-analytic procedures were used to estimate the effect of experienced guilt on compliance. Examination of 47 effect sizes indicated that inducing guilt is an effective means by which to increase compliance, ρ = .26. Moreover, despite coding for numerous substantive and methodological moderators, there was no evidence of moderation in these data....

Plagiarism is a prevalent form of academic dishonesty in the undergraduate instructional context. Although students engage in plagiarism with some frequency, instructors often do little to help students understand the significance of plagiarism or to create assignments that reduce its likelihood. This study reports survey, coding, and TurnItIn soft...

Many normative beliefs are shared and learned through interpersonal communication, yet research on norms typically focuses on their effects rather than the communication that shapes them. This study focused on interpersonal communication during pregnancy to uncover (a) the nature of pregnancy-related communication and (b) normative information tran...