Thomas Frissen

• Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
• Professor (Assistant) at Maastricht University

Objectives Violence committed by extremists has serious violent and non-violent public health consequences. Researchers have hypothesized an association between experiencing discrimination and support for radicalization. This study examines the relationship between perceived discrimination and support for violent extremism among youth and young adu...

Self-injurious behavior is often practiced in secrecy or involves body parts that are easy to hide, making early detection difficult and hampering intervention and treatment. However, cutting, one of the most common intentional forms of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), is relatively often shared publicly via new digital media technologies. We explor...

This paper reports on an analysis of networked representations of Jews and Jewishness on social media. It builds on prior research on the usage of Twitter hashtags for issue framing (Meraz, 2017; Meraz and Papacharissi, 2013), and extends it to the leading photo-sharing platform Instagram. We collected a dataset of 1500 Instagram posts marked with...

Anecdotal evidence asserts that extremist materials on the internet play a decisive role in radicalization processes. However, due to a structural absence of empirical data in the current literature, it remains uncertain if—and to what extent—online extremist materials radicalize. Therefore, the approach of the current study was two-fold. First, we...

While COVID-19 spreads aggressively and rapidly across the globe, many societies have also witnessed the spread of other viral phenomena like misinformation, conspiracy theories, and general mass suspicions about what is really going on. This study investigates how exposure to and trust in information sources, and anxiety and depression, are associ...

Internet memes are a fundamental aspect of digital culture. Despite being individual expressions, they vastly transcend the individual level as windows into and vehicles for wide-stretching social, cultural, and political narratives. Empirical research into meme culture is thriving, yet particularly compartmentalized. In the humanities and social s...

Countering violent radicalization is a priority in many countries, prompting research that assesses attitudes and beliefs about violent radicalization in the general population. The majority of violent radicalization assessments have been developed among specific populations, with limited investigation into the generalizability and cross-cultural a...

The current study investigates how public attitudes and perceptions about the COVID-19 pandemic evolve over time and influence self-reported health behaviors (e. g., social distancing). Specific attention was paid to respondents' exposure to different news media channels (public vs. commercial). We used data from a two-wave panel study with a 3-wee...

Phantom cell phone signals are tactile, auditory, and/or visual experiences suggesting that a mobile device is receiving calls, text messages, or other push notifications when in fact it is not. These phantom sensations appear to be common among cell phone users, although prevalence rates vary between the different forms (phantom vibrations are the...

From Worrying About Terror To Being Convinced Of The ‘Muslim Danger’? A Cross-Sectional Investigation Of The Association Between Exposure To Terrorism News Coverage, Terrorism Catastrophizing, And Threat Related Attitudes Towards Muslims ABSTRACT: News media coverage of terrorist acts has often been considered to be sensational, unbalanced, and st...

The current study set out to investigate to what extent ISIS is bolstering its jihadist ideology on a 'cut-and-paste' or 'cherry-picked' version of Islam in their renowned online propaganda magazine Dabiq. The main objective was to examine in a systematic and quantitative way to what extent ISIS utilizes the Koran in an atomistic, truncated and tai...