Srividya Ramasubramanian

Syracuse University | SU · S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications

This study focuses on the role of media in facilitating and inhibiting the accessibility of stereotypes primed by race-related news stories. Specifically, it examines experimentally the effects of two strategies for reducing stereotype accessibility: an audience-centered approach that explicitly instructs audiences to be critical media consumers, a...

This article argues that exposure to admirable media celebrities from racial/ethnic outgroups is an effective, proactive, and viable strategy for prejudice reduction and intergroup harmony. It uses mediated contact and exemplification theories to demonstrate that reading news stories about likable outgroup media personalities who serve as counter-s...

This study examines how exposure to media characters of color shapes viewers’ opinions of race-targeted policies. Exemplar-based information processing, attribution theory, and heuristic policy decision-making formed the theoretical foundation for the study. A 2 × 2 factorial experiment (N = 363) exposed participants to stereotypical or counterster...

This research examines the role of media literacy training and counter-stereotypical news stories in prejudice reduction. Research participants read either stereotypical or counter-stereotypical news stories after exposure to a media literacy video or a control video. After this, they completed a paper-and-pencil questionnaire that included Likert-...

Mindfulness is defined as non-judgmental awareness in the present lived experience. Researchers find that mindfulness training has benefits such as enhanced positive emotions, reduced stress and increased well-being. However, empirical research on the effectiveness of mindfulness curricula on emerging adults in educational settings is sparse. The p...

This essay is an introduction to the special issue on “Difficult Conversations Concerning Identity and Difference.” The essay begins with our argument that inquiries into difficult conversations are important as these interactions are key to addressing social inequities, creating and/or maintaining community and relational solidarity, amplifying vo...

p> In the age of AI, when models like DALL-E and ChatGPT impact countless aspects of our lives, the dehumanizing and harmful features of AI that have plagued data science since its inception continue resulting in the routine erasure, exploitation, and subjugation of people of color, Indigenous people, women, queer, non-binary, immigrant, dis/able...

p> In the age of AI, when models like DALL-E and ChatGPT impact countless aspects of our lives, the dehumanizing and harmful features of AI that have plagued data science since its inception continue resulting in the routine erasure, exploitation, and subjugation of people of color, Indigenous people, women, queer, non-binary, immigrant, dis/able...

This chapter focuses on the role of community-oriented art and storytelling interventions relating to migrant health and healing. With the COVID-19 pandemic, confinement at home, social and physical isolation, homeschooling by parents, and fear due to lack of physical safety have led to heightened emotional responses, anxiety, depression, and PTSD...

There is a long history of scholarship documenting the prevalence of racial and ethnic stereotypes in media and popular culture. This body of literature demonstrates that media stereotypes have changed over time across specific racial/ethnic groups, media formats, and genres. Historically, the bulk of this research has focused on representations in...

The U.S. population is becoming more diverse in terms of race, ethnicity, religion, gender, and sexuality. In some ways, television, film, video game, and news content reflect that reality. Yet, in other ways, such content falls short, in terms of underrepresenting particular social groups and/or depicting those groups in a limited manner. The curr...

Embodied transnationalism is characterized by intimate experiences of human-made political borders that define, limit, and restrict flows of the “Other.” In the Quarantined Across Borders collection, contributors from immigrant and diasporic backgrounds address the material and discursive differences in how they experience the pandemic in terms of...

Meditation is a mind–body practice that involves turning one's attention inwards to anchor one's attention to still the mind and relax the body. Rooted in Indian yoga and Buddhist contemplative traditions, meditation has now been adopted across various cultures and contexts for holistic health, healing, and spiritual well‐being by reducing stress a...

The role of trauma and its consequences for health have led to greater awareness on this topic in the recent past. A trauma‐informed approach to healthcare systems, healthcare, and health communication informs us about the need for such systems to understand the impact of trauma, especially complex and chronic forms, on physical, emotional, mental,...

Guided by the theory of planned behavior and the science communication learning goals model, we conducted a survey to identify science communication training needs of university scientists (n = 266) at a large US land-grant university. Results indicate that most respondents believed scientists and media relations offices were most responsible for c...

We investigated how to improve PSC at a large, public university with high research activity by examining scientists’ interest and enjoyment in PSC, their perceived aptitude of PSC skills, the channels they use for PSC, their reasons for choosing to participate in PSC, and the tools they need to engage effectively. We conducted a case study and col...

Investigating the role of identity in mediated experiences involves a great deal of complexity. However, media psychologists all too often explore the antecedents and consequences of identity in ways that less than optimally grapple with this complexity. In this essay, we build on the critical media effects (CME) approach to offer innovative ways t...

It is often assumed that media literacy serves to protect and uphold democratic practice and that media literate citizens are the best safeguards for democracy. However, little attention is paid to defining this practice and its relationship to ongoing inequities within democratic societies. In this essay, we argue media literacy operates from thre...

This paper describes the Trauma-informed Equity-minded Asset-based Model (TEAM) framework for social justice-oriented educators. We draw on trauma-informed approaches to illustrate how systemic racism as systemic trauma and normative whiteness as dominant ideology are embedded in the U.S education and media institutions. From an equity-minded persp...

Hegemonic Open Science, emergent from the circuits of knowledge production in the Global North and serving the economic interests of platform capitalism, systematically erase the voices of the subaltern margins from the Global South and the Southern margins inhabiting the North. Framed within an overarching emancipatory narrative of creating access...

This paper presents an empirically grounded conceptual framework for the various dimensions of scholar-activism based on 15 in-depth interviews with prominent communication scholar-activists. It theorizes about the meanings, practices, challenges, and opportunities encompassed by this type of scholarship from the perspective of those in the field....

Communication lies at the center of scholar-activism, community initiatives, and social movements. With the re-emergence of authoritarianism, threats to academic freedom, and widening socio-economic inequalities in a global pandemic, balancing the tensions between activism and scholarship is becoming increasingly challenging for communication schol...

This paper describes the Trauma-informed Equity-minded Asset-based Model (TEAM) framework for social justice-oriented educators. We draw on trauma-informed approaches to illustrate how systemic racism as systemic trauma and normative whiteness as dominant ideology are embedded in the U.S education and media institutions. From an equity-minded persp...

The role of trauma and its consequences for health has led to greater awareness on this topic in the recent past. A trauma-informed approach to healthcare systems, health care, and health communication informs us about the need for such systems to understand the impact of trauma, especially complex and chronic forms, on physical, emotional, mental,...

Meditation is a mind-body practice that involves turning one's attention inwards to anchor one's attention to still the mind and relax the body. Rooted in Indian yoga and Buddhist contemplative traditions, meditation has now been adopted across various cultures and contexts for holistic health, healing, and spiritual well-being by reducing stress a...

The role of media use on mental health distress is particularly concerning during the COVID-19 global pandemic. The vulnerabilities to and experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States are greatly influenced by racial/ethnic inequalities. The COVID-19 pandemic may present unique mental health challenges for Asian Americans because of ra...

The ubiquity of digital and social media has led to considerable academic debate regarding their role in the lives of children and adolescents. The Global North, especially United States and Europe, has largely led this discussion in matters of research methods and approaches, as well as on conversations around screen time, wellbeing, media literac...

Amidst all the negative stereotypes rightly advanced in the preceding chapters of this book, a look at the positive seems an important and necessary coda to encompass the full picture of media stereotyping as we enter the 2020s. As we navigate a global COVID-19 pandemic, outbreak inequalities, discrimination and stigma (based on various identities...

Media psychologists need to reflect on what is considered ethical research in an increasingly complex digital media and sociocultural landscape by asking questions about whose interests are served through research and the purposes that research is used for. Ethical values such as truth, equity, justice, and inclusion should govern all aspects of re...

Intergroup contact is defined as interactions between members of different social groups. Contact is essentially a communicative process. Empirical evidence suggests that positive intergroup contact can lead to prejudice reduction, especially for members of the dominant group. Although intergroup contact is typically defined as face‐to‐face contact...

In this essay, we advance the Critical Media Effects (CME) framework as a way of bridging two major subfields of communication that seldom speak to one another: media effects scholarship and critical cultural communication. Critical Media Effects is situated within the dominant mode of social scientific theorizing within media effects scholarship a...

Amidst all the negative stereotypes rightly advanced in the preceding chapters of this book, a look at the positive seems an important and necessary coda to encompass the full picture of media stereotyping as we enter the 2020s. As we navigate a global COVID-19 pandemic, outbreak inequalities, discrimination and stigma (based on various identities...

That this special issue has seen the light of day is primarily due to the vision of Todd Sandel, the outgoing editor of the Journal of International and Intercultural Communication, who readily identified the relative lack of visibility of South Asia focused intercultural communication research, suggested a special issue, and offered us total edito...

Connecting media literacy to the ethical, social, and emancipatory aspects of information societies within media-saturated convergence culture is an essential task in conceptualizing active digital citizenship. In this chapter we argue that media literacy’s full potential cannot be expressed unless the transformative power of digital new media is g...

Intergroup contact is defined as interactions between members of different social groups. Contact is essentially a communicative process. Empirical evidence suggests that positive intergroup contact can lead to prejudice reduction, especially for members of the dominant group. Although intergroup contact is typically defined as face-to-face contact...

Media psychologists need to reflect on what is considered ethical research in an increasingly complex digital media and sociocultural landscape by asking questions about whose interests are served through research and the purposes that research is used for. Ethical values such as truth, equity, justice, and inclusion should govern all aspects of re...

This chapter examines ideas of Rajarshi leadership, derived from Indic traditions, through a feminist critical sociological lens. Traditional Western norms about leadership are associated with masculine values such as power, dominance, violence, and authority that reinforce hierarchies and patriarchal structures. Feminist perspectives provide subst...

Media and popular culture often serve as sites for the creation and perpetuation of negative ethnic stereotypes. Social cognitive theory, priming, and script theory explain that repeated omission, misrepresentation, and trivialization of minorities in the media have important implications for identity formation and intergroup relations. Biased medi...

Politicians within the United States and across many Western societies are concerned about the extent to which Muslims are successfully integrating within their countries. The present research examined how interpersonal (discrimination) and mediated (negative news coverage of Muslims) social identity threats dynamically change young Muslim American...

Media are a ubiquitous and integral part of everyday living in this networked, interactive, and global world. The digital revolution has dramatically changed how we experience life, what we know about ourselves, how we spend our leisure time, how we connect with others around us, and what we learn about the world around us. This rapid diffusion of...

The mass exodus of millions of Syrians from their country due to worsening war conditions has become a serious global humanitarian crisis. As the number of displaced refugees rises, so does the number of those living in inhuman conditions. This content analysis examines how popular news discourses shape the geopolitics of the Syrian refugee crisis....

This essay examines white nationalist discourses within the U.S. context of the alt-right movement from a decolonial perspective. It challenges concepts grounded in the enlightenment era that connect whiteness and European identity with civilisation and progress, thereby positioning whiteness as a disciplinary discourse. Specifically, our essay wil...

This study explores death narratives in the popular international medical dramas Grey’s Anatomy (USA), Casualty (UK), All Saints (Australia), and E.R. (USA). Using narrative analysis, we characterize death portrayals in terms of the number and causes of the deaths, the types of characters who die, the narrative structures of the deaths, and themes...

At this particular juncture in U.S. history, the fictional entertainment and news media stories we tell about black men are vitally important to our individual and collective development as a society. Mainstream media frequently reproduce white racial frames by presenting white characters as normal and superior to characters of color in narratives...

Media play an important role in perpetuating racial and gender stereotypes that harm the self-esteem and self-concept of marginalized youth, especially for Latino/a youth in the US context. However, this article illustrates that through a participatory media and media literacy approach, media can also become part of the solution. The main aim of th...

How do children and youth come to understand what it means to be a member of a particular race, gender, and other social groups? How do they come to hold beliefs about the groups that they do and do not belong to? Both news stories and fictional narratives that we are tuned into as a culture tell stories about what it means to be a member of a part...

Racist incidents are moments that highlight the systemic racism that still exists within higher education. In 2016, the College of Liberal Arts at a historically White, Southern institution in the U.S. responded to a racist incident on campus by setting up a series of ‘Difficult Dialogue on Campus Race Relations’ sessions that gave participants the...

With every new wave of media technology, parents typically experience either moral panic or extreme optimism about the emerging media. However, the research on this topic is much more nuanced than recommending an all-or-none media approach. This book in fact provides ample evidence for how content and context should be taken into consideration in u...

Direct and indirect social identity threats can influence stigmatized individuals to seek identity management strategies that restore a positive sense of social identity. The current study examined the effects of media representations and self-reported experiences of discrimination on Muslim American students’ identity management strategies. Result...

Recent scholarship on media psychology acknowledges that media entertainment offers not only purely hedonistic enjoyment but also meaningful experiences. This study expands our understanding of media enjoyment by exploring the role of media entertainment in evoking spiritual emotions and beliefs, such as those related to connectedness, blessedness,...

Media play an important part in forming, maintaining, and countering social stigmata. Whether based on physical traits, moral character, or shared “tribal” markers, a stigma is a socially constructed process of discrediting those who deviate from social norms. Media representations provide cues about who belongs in a society, which groups are to be...

This study focuses on how and why Indian American immigrants engage with movies from their home country in a transnational global context. Existing literature has focused on lack of host language proficiency as the primary reason for ethnic media consumption. We suggest that for Indian Americans, the motivation for consuming Indian films is driven...

This article explores the underlying processes that influence the ways in which mainstream and ethnic media shape ethnic minority audiences’self-concepts. Ethnic minorities are often underrepresented and presented in stereotypicalandnegative ways in mainstream popular U.S. culture, while ethnic media tend to represent them in more diverse and auspi...

The current study examines the Barack Obama presidency through the lens of racialized news framing and symbolic racism. Racial prejudice often manifests as subtle symbolic racism in so-called postracial America by supporting beliefs that racial minorities have gained undeserved advantage and are no longer discriminated against. Even when counter-st...

This study focuses on how racial minorities are actively adapting, resisting, and challenging the practices of mainstream media in a convergence era. Through collaborative, community-based, transmedia storytelling initiatives, racial minority groups are fostering new critical media literacies and active digital citizenship. This article focuses on...

Exploring the Roots of Digital and Media Literacy through Personal Narrative provides a wide-ranging look at the origins, concepts, theories, and practices of the field. This unique, exciting collection of essays by a range of distinguished scholars and practitioners offers insights into the scholars and thinkers who fertilized the minds of those w...

Two studies examined the effects of reliance on direct and media-based contact for information about Muslims on Americans' stereotypic beliefs of and negative emotions toward Muslims and support for public policies harming Muslims domestically and internationally. Results revealed that reliance on media for information about Muslims was positively...

In this essay, we bring together academics and activists from around the world in a “conversation café” to share their perspectives on the past, present, and future of children and media with specific emphasis on building meaningful cross-sector partnerships. Key change-agents from academe, nonprofits, and for-profit organizations committed to yout...

An increasing number of health seekers in the United States are looking outside conventional medicine to address their health needs. It is estimated that in the United States, 38% of adults use complementary and alternative medicine (CAM). Extant research characterizes CAM users as a unified homogeneous group, with little understanding of the diffe...

This article provides a review of the research record on the potential for media literacy education to intervene in the media's influence on racial and ethnic stereotypes, and explores the theoretical concepts that underlie these efforts. It situates media literacy theory and practice within particular emphases in the field and synthesizes qualitat...

Media portrayals often form the primary, if not only, source of social and interactive information about various groups in society. Mainstream mass media have historically marginalized, trivialized, demeaned, and underrepresented minority groups. Consequently, media effects scholars have expressed concern with ways in which audiences use stereotypi...

Given the popularity of comedy, humor is an important avenue for examining the racial/ethnic stereotyping effects. Grounded in social identity theory, this study explores the effects of stereotypical comedy on Latino audiences. A 2 × 2 × 2 factorial experiment was conducted to explore how Latino participants’ (N = 150) racial/ethnic identification...

This chapter focuses on emerging scholarship on positive media effects and spirituality. The definitions and conceptualizations of spirituality and its various dimensions (cognitive, affective, and behavioral) are discussed. Relevant theories drawn from positive psychology, Eastern philosophies such as mindfulness, wellness/holistic health, organiz...

The present investigation uses intergroup contact and media systems’ dependency theories to illuminate the relative significance of various sources of information in shaping Caucasian-American attitudes toward African-Americans. It uses empirical data from an exploratory survey of college students to build a chain of related variables that link pri...

This paper uses survey methods (N=385) to examine the underlying processes through which U.S. fans create meaningful relationships with Japanese media characters. Specifically, this study tests an integrated model linking character perceptions, wishful identification, and parasocial relationships in the context of fans of shōjo, a heroine-centric g...

An extensive body of research has already illustrated the myriad ways in which media help form perceptions of various social groups. Theories such as cultivation, stereotype theory, social learning, and social identity theory all discuss how audiences can internalize what they see presented in the media, and project that information onto their beli...

This paper explores how television exposure influences White viewers’ attitudes toward Asian-Americans. Prior research reveals that the dominant image of Asian-Americans in contemporary television is that of the “model minority.” Drawing on cultivation, social identity, and causal attribution theories, this study explores the negative outcomes of t...

This paper explores how cognitive beliefs, emotional feelings, and attitudinal evaluations toward racial/ethnic out-groups are inter-related. The first two studies examined the content and strength of contemporary cultural stereotypes associated by White-American participants with African-Americans and Asian-Indians. Path analyses using empirical d...

This paper explores how White viewers' perceived portrayals of African-Americans and Latino-Americans on TV influence their real-world feelings and beliefs about these outgroups, which in turn affect their support for race-targeted policies. A computer-based survey (N=323) included measures relating to perceptions about racial/ethnic groups on tele...

Matrimonial ads serve as unobtrusive sites to observe the construction and perpetuation of normative heterosexuality through socio-cultural discourses. The current study focuses on gendered spousal expectations and sex role preferences in 1065 matrimonial ads from two popular newspapers in India. Gender differences in ad type, financial stability,...

This exploratory study proposes the Mixed Emotions and Character Appeal (MECA) Model to understand the role of emotions in evaluations of fictional video game characters. This model seeks to integrate the Stereotype Content Model (SCM) and the Perceiving and Experiencing Fictional Characters (PEFiC) framework by suggesting that character morality,...

This research explores the idea that when making estimates of media influence on the self and others, individuals often assume reinforcement of existing attitudes rather than assume that media content necessarily creates or changes attitudes. Consequently, perceptions of favorable attitudes on an issue should result in judgments that media strength...

A hypothetical path model investigated how viewing U.S. television would be associated with feelings of relative deprivation among Asians. The South Korean survey data (N = 352) revealed that viewing U.S. television was associated with estimates of Americans' affluence, and the estimates were in turn associated with dissatisfaction with Korean soci...

In this chapter, we provide an overview of our efforts to assess teens’ exposure to media content and the challenges we have encountered in developing our measures. Specifically, we present data from an exploratory study which illustrates that adolescents are growing up in a multiple-media environment, much of adolescent media use is idiosyncratic,...

Two experiments were conducted to explore the contributions of sexual and violent images contained in movie previews on viewers' anticipated perceptions and enjoyment of previewed films. In neither study were portrayals of sex or violence directly associated with greater anticipated enjoyment. However, both studies provided evidence that sexual and...