Yotam Ophir

University at Buffalo, The State University of New York | SUNY Buffalo · Department of Communication

This edited volume examines the ways in which rapidly changing technologies and patterns of media use influence, and are influenced by, our emotional experiences. Following introductory chapters outlining common conceptual frameworks used in the study of emotion and digital media effects, this book is then organized around four general areas highli...

A confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) of responses to 13 questions from a 2022 national probability sample of 1,154 US adults supported the existence of five factors that we argue assess perceptions of Factors Assessing Science’s Self-Presentation (FASS). These factors also predict support for increasing federal funding of science and, separately, s...

Chronic illness affects millions worldwide, rendering the life of those affected complex to manage. Extant research points to the need for effective and supportive care for the successful treatment, yet health care encounters for this population are often filled with negative experiences, ranging from discontinuity of care to disenfranchisement fro...

The 2016 U.S. elections, the Brexit vote, and other events in recent years have raised public and scholarly awareness around massive foreign propaganda efforts (Jamieson, 2018; Walter et al., 2020). While much academic attention has been given to the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) and, particularly, their attempt to influence the American p...

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is a terminal, neurodegenerative disease, and consequently is difficult to communicate about as it is stigmatized, and discussions are rife with misconceptions. By situating AD conversations in the sociocultural space of the opportunity model of presence during the end-of-life process, a framework developed illustrating the...

This edited volume examines the ways in which rapidly changing technologies and patterns of media use influence, and are influenced by, our emotional experiences. Following introductory chapters outlining common conceptual frameworks used in the study of emotion and digital media effects, this book is then organized around four general areas highli...

As concerns about social bots online increase, studies have attempted to explore the discourse they produce, and its effects on individuals and the public at large. We argue that the common reliance on aggregated scores of binary classifiers for bot detection may have yielded biased or inaccurate results. To test this possibility, we systematically...

Despite the existence of multiple propaganda campaigns from around the globe, most scholarly attention has been primarily given to those operated by Russia. This focus on a single country has limited the scope of propaganda research. We offer a systematic comparison of six campaigns, examining the issues they engaged with, and their deployment stra...

Critical to managing a crisis such as COVID-19 is the propagation of information to all vulnerable populations. Despite guidelines regarding communicating with people with differing accessibility needs during crises, some often find their needs unmet. Following a lack of assisted communications for d/Deaf people during the COVID-19 pandemic, a Twit...

Romantic comedies have long been understood to create unrealistic views of relationships. In the current study, we tested theory-driven corrective strategies for counteracting potentially harmful beliefs about romantic relationships. In an online experiment ( N = 626), participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions: to a no exposure...

Predicting film success has proven challenging, with prior research examining factors including budget, production studios, and stars, to varied degrees of accuracy. Missing was the impact of film scripts and latent linguistic features, examined here through textual analysis. Recent computational study identified the latent thematic content of near...

Recent studies documented alarming growth in antiscientific discourse among extremist groups online and especially the relatively high anti-vaccine attitudes among White Nationalists (WN). In light of accelerated politization of COVID-19 containment measures and the expansion of containment to lockdowns, masking, and more, we examine current sentim...

A data-rich analysis of how the four inter-related crises of 2020 -- the COVID-19 pandemic, the economic collapse and K-shaped recovery, the clashes over the legacy of racism and policing, and assaults on the legitimacy of democratic institutions (abetted by conspiracy theories) -- shaped not only the 2020 election, but also the future of our democ...

Over the past forty years, what we, as a discipline, define as advertising research has been negotiated through our primary scholastic contribution to the field: peer reviewed journal articles. The question ‘what is advertising research?’ may produce different answers by different scholars during various points of the history of our field. The goal...

For over five decades, researchers explored the volume of coverage countries receive in other countries’ media, the factors that shape countries’ newsworthy, and sentiment in their coverage. However, a quantitative systematic analysis of how countries are covered, specifically, the framing of coverage, has been lacking. We first utilize machine lea...

We examined hashtag activism promoting Taiwan’s participation in the global efforts to combat COVID-19. We employed the computational Analysis of Topic Model Networks (ANTMN) to examine the discourse around the #TaiwanCanHelp/#TWforWHO campaign in 2020 ( N = 163,876) on Twitter. Our model identified 35 topics clustered within three frames. The cont...

According to the Great Replacement conspiracy theory, nonwhites, globalists and elites are plotting to eliminate the white race and its dominance through anti-white policies and increased immigration. In that context, abortion among white women is perceived by white nationalists (WN) as a betrayal of their “biological” and “traditional” gender role...

Background: Within United States cultures and societies, topics related to death and dying continue to be taboo, and opportunities for presence and engagement during end-of-life that could lead to a good death are avoided as a result. Several efforts have been made to help people engage in advance care planning (ACP) conversations, including comple...

Resistance to vaccines has hindered attempts to contain and prevent outbreaks of infectious diseases for centuries. More recently, however, the term “vaccine hesitancy” has been used to describe not necessarily outright resistance but also a delay in acceptance or uncertainty regarding vaccines. Given concerns about hesitancy and its impact on vacc...

Introduction Research has indicated a growing resistance to vaccines among U.S. conservatives and Republicans. Following past successes of the far-right in mainstreaming health misinformation, this study tracks almost two decades of vaccine discourse on the extremist, white nationalist (WN) online message-board Stormfront. We examine the argumentat...

BACKGROUND Within most Western societies, topics related to death and dying continue to be taboo, and opportunities for presence and engagement during end-of-life that could lead to a good death are avoided as a result. Several efforts have been made to help people engage in advance care planning (ACP) conversations, including completing advance ca...

Media framing of social protests can influence public opinion and governmental response. An extensive line of scholarly work had pointed to the existence of two alternative news frames; public order and debate. We argue that prior work may have been limited by the reliance on deductive strategies using predefined, theoretically-driven frames. Using...

For more than five decades, researchers have explored the volume and sentiment of coverage foreign countries receive in other countries’ media including the factors that make countries more or less newsworthy, and the sentiment of coverage. However, partially due to methodological limitations, a quantitative comparative analysis of how countries ar...

Experiencing shifts between affective states (emotional flow) while reading a narrative has been proposed to enhance persuasion. Yet, empirical support remains scarce and inconsistent. This experiment (N = 402) examines how transitioning between discrete emotions, chosen based on appraisal theories of emotions, can influence self-reported emotional...

Popular films within the romantic comedy genre set social expectations for romantic relationships, sexual activity, and gender roles, especially for young audiences. Nevertheless, academic research on the genre is scarce and mostly limited to manual content analyses conducted on relatively small samples of films. To systematically examine trends in...

This study examines the effects of exposure to media narratives about science on perceptions pertaining to the reliability of science, including trust, beliefs, and support for science. In an experiment (n = 4497), participants were randomly assigned to read stories representing ecologically valid media narratives; the honorable quest, counterfeit...

Media framing of epidemics was found to influence public perceptions and behaviors in experiments, yet no research has been conducted on real-world behaviors during public health crises. We examined the relationship between Italian news media coverage of COVID-19 and compliance with stay-at-home orders, which could impact the spread of epidemics. W...

This chapter examined the emotional flow hypothesis that suggested that emotional shifts in response to educational narratives promote and sustain message engagement, and that engagement, in turn, can promote story-consistent attitudes and beliefs. We conducted two controlled experimental studies, manipulating emotional flow through discrete emotio...

A fundamental challenge complicates news decisions about covering vaccine side effects: although serious vaccine side effects are rare, less severe ones do occur occasionally. The study was designed to test whether a side effect message could induce vaccine hesitancy and whether that could be countered by pro-vaccine messages about vaccine safety....

Past studies examined the prevalence of strategy framing in news coverage and its effects on cynicism, knowledge, and content evaluation. Missing from the literature is an examination of the relationship between strategy framing in news and electoral success, the actual goal of political campaigns. Similarly, factors that shape media use of strateg...

YouTube's propagation of misleading protobacco content to youth has the potential to increase their protobacco beliefs, attitudes, and smoking behavior. We assessed the effects of potential interventions aimed at ameliorating the effect of misleading protobacco videos. An online experiment randomly exposed past and current young tobacco users (N =...

Insufficient scientific evidence about electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) has led to conflicting recommendations (CRs) by credible scientific organizations, creating a public health debate that could prove especially difficult to reconcile as current and former smokers make decisions about whether to use e-cigarettes. To investigate how CRs about...

One of the great strengths of the field of communication is its interdisciplinarity. Yet this strength brings challenges, including rifts between diverse subfields. In this study, we illustrate the rich potential of collaborations across subfields. Specifically, we argue that due to often-overlooked epistemological similarities, unsupervised machin...

Direct-to-consumer (DTC) genetic testing companies like 23andMe, Ancestry.com, and MyHeritage have become increasingly popular in the past few years. Despite the prevalence of these testing kits, there has not been much done to understand the ways in which DTC genetic testing is framed in mass media. This study analyzed 973 news articles from four...

Romantic comedies are a staple of the Hollywood movie system and are often ranked among the most successful and influential movies in the industry. As a result, they maintain a cultural status as influencers and educators on relationships, sex, gender roles, and social expectations, especially for young audiences. Prior attempts to examine the con...

Objectives. To understand how Twitter accounts operated by the Russian Internet Research Agency (IRA) discussed vaccines to increase the credibility of their manufactured personas. Methods. We analyzed 2.82 million tweets published by 2689 IRA accounts between 2015 and 2017. Combining unsupervised machine learning and network analysis to identify “...

Studies have demonstrated an increase in the use of strategy framing in coverage of political campaigns over the years, and during campaign cycles. Despite increases in politicians’ and voters’ use of social media, very little is known about the use of framing in e-campaigns. This study examines Republican presidential candidates’ Twitter activity...

Framing is one of the most central, applicable, and contested theories in communication research. At the heart of the debate on framing is the question of operationalizing and measuring emphasis frames. We harness novel computational tools to propose a new method for inductive identification of frames. We argue and demonstrate that frame elements c...

Content analysis identified three dominant themes used by the news media to cover epidemics: the scientific, the pandemic, and the social. This study uses a randomized experimental design to test the effects of common news coverage patterns of epidemics on perceptions of efficacy, certainty, and trust in the CDC, and subsequently on intentions to c...

Misinformation can influence personal and societal decisions in detrimental ways. Not only is misinformation challenging to correct, but even when individuals accept corrective information, misinformation can continue to influence attitudes: a phenomenon known as belief echoes, affective perseverance, or the continued influence effect. Two controll...

This study assessed the effects of the February through September 2016 American news media’s coverage of Zika Virus (ZIKV) risk on the U.S. public’s familiarity, knowledge and behavior in the form of interpersonal discussions. A content analysis (N = 2,782 pieces) revealed that the Rio Olympic Games elicited a spike in coverage of Zika. We also fou...

Launched in 2002 in response to inadequate communications during the anthrax attacks and in preparations to the threats posed by H5N1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) framework provides health professionals with trainings, tools, and resources to help them communicate effectively...

Warning labels on tobacco products sometimes feature images and stories of real people whose health has been affected by smoking. We examined effects of some of the design elements that may contribute to the effectiveness of these testimonial pictorial warning labels (PWLs). Beginning with a testimonial PWL that contained an image of a person and a...

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) framework has been used by the organization during recent outbreaks of infectious diseases. However, the dissemination of the organization's crisis messages depends largely on mass media coverage. This study analyzed 5,006 articles from leading Ameri...

Background: People's intentions to use vaccines are influenced by their beliefs about both the specific vaccine and the disease it prevents. In the absence of firm beliefs about Zika virus (ZIKV), individuals may base their intentions to vaccinate against it on beliefs about other vaccines, and specifically the misbelief that MMR causes autism. M...

Launched in 2002 in response to inadequate communications during the anthrax attacks and in preparations to the threats posed by H5N1, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)’s Crisis and Emergency Risk Communication (CERC) framework provides health professionals with trainings, tools, and resources to help them communicate effectively...

Introduction: Pictorial warning labels (PWL) that use photographs and the personal details of real people whose health has been affected by smoking (testimonial PWL) provide factual information about the consequences of tobacco use. Methods: 924 adult current smokers participated in an online experiment that tested responses to four types of war...

The effects of emotional flow on narrative engagement – An empirical test

The current study examined the effects of manipulating the level of vividness through the presence of various textual and visual components in the context of tobacco warning labels. An online experiment was conducted (N = 2,165) to examine whether increasing the vividness of warning labels, using narrative and nonnarrative components, increased eng...

The coverage of risk information about Zika in U.S media and its effects on the public

Purpose: Test the potential effectiveness of warning labels (WL) featuring the images of real people whose health has been affected by tobacco (testimonial WL). Methodology: In an online experiment, we tested responses to four different types of WL: 1) text only WL (currently on packs); 2) image only non-testimonial WL (I-NTWL; previously proposed...

Objective: In 2006, the US District Court held that tobacco companies had “falsely and fraudulently” denied that tobacco causes lung cancer, environmental smoke endangers children's respiratory systems, nicotine is highly addictive, low tar cigarettes were less harmful when they were not, they marketed to children, they manipulated nicotine deliver...

The great virtues of the Internet - ease of access, lack of regulation, vast potential audiences, and fast flow of information, among others - have been exploited by terrorist groups. Consequently, the Internet has become a useful and effective platform for terrorist organizations and their supporters. Applying para-social relationships theory, thi...