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The pre-school environment is evidently complex as it exists across a wide variety of school setups, policies, principles, and practices. Some schools highly discourage media viewing while maintaining a relatively conservative non-sexist and non-violent curriculum; other schools even include such media and characters in their daily activities. This chapter takes three different schools with three different approaches to media — one where it is restricted, one from a poor area, and one in which the media environment is perceived to be the most inclusive. Through this measure, the chapter is able to examine further the teachers’s views regarding the factors that may influence beliefs about particular media effects, and to point out how these facilities serve as a primary venue in practicing early socialization, especially with regard to media and both the illegitimate and legitimate forms of cultural capital.

This chapter offers an analytical account of the definitions of public opinion, the roles of the mass media, and how they may influence the government and politics of Hong Kong. It also proposes a discursive conception of public opinion that is characterized by struggles to represent public opinion and mediated by professional communicators. The chapter then unravels four types of media effect, including agenda-setting effects, publicity effects, legitimation effects, and omission effects. Moreover, the mechanisms in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region (HKSAR) government and the strategies it employs in influencing and mediating public opinion are addressed. Furthermore, the impacts of the media in the making of public opinion and collective action in Hong Kong are explained.

This introductory chapter underlines the importance and originality of the book as a contribution to our understanding of the fate of Weimar democracy. It reflects on the connection between media consumption and electoral behaviour, and challenges previously held assumptions about the role of the press in the political process. It provides a discussion of the difficulties of using newspapers as a historical source, and of the methodological problem of assessing something as complex as media effects. It summarizes key historical debates on the rise of Nazism, and places them in the context of media theory.

As the ABC billboard emphasizes that watching TV exudes hipness and honour in spite of the negative connotations that it is attributed with, this is made possible only because this advertising was released during the age of the Internet. Although there may be people who stay up all night while surfing the net or tinkering nonstop with the computer, television viewing could also be associated with the lack of education, unemployment, and may even be seen as an ‘addiction’. While the case studies presented in this book exhibit opinions of those from the middle class in terms of how television viewing can be associated with vulgarity, laziness, and passivity, the book has also observed how television viewing causes its most severe media effects on those from this social class.

This chapter explores how emotional arousal is a common component of everyday experience. Arousal can be positive and/or negative, and it can vary greatly in its intensity. Importantly, arousal is a state of excitation that involves activation of the autonomic nervous system and heightened activity in both mind and body. Television has been viewed as particularly capable of prompting emotional arousal relative to print. Studies of media effects have focused primarily on the effects of television on arousal in the form of fear and aggression in response to violent media. The chapter uses highly controlled laboratory experiments to evaluate the consequences of close-ups and incivility for viewers' levels of emotional arousal and their memory of political television content.

This chapter explores the way in which dispositionism maintains its dominance as an attributional framework despite failing to capture accurately the causes of human behavior. The answer lies in a subordinate dynamic and discourse, naïve cynicism: the basic subconscious mechanism by which dispositionists discredit and dismiss generally more accurate situationist insights and their proponents. Without the operation of naïve cynicism, dispositionism would be far more vulnerable to challenge and change. Naïve cynicism is, thus, critically important to explaining how and why certain legal policies manage to carry the day. As a case study, the chapter considers the naïve cynical backlash against situationist accounts of the causes of prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, and other detentions centers.

The ‘media effects’ paradigm of mass communication research has produced a substantial body of knowledge about the psychological impact of audiovisual media. Although music exists in virtually every type of audiovisual media, relatively little media effects research has focused on the psychology of music. Better integration of media effects research and the study of music psychology would mutually benefit both disciplines. This integration can be established by investigating music in relation to media effects antecedents (causes) such as the attributes of media users, media content and form, and interactivity. Integration can also be achieved by considering the role of music in theories and models used in media effects research. Examples of these theories and models include social cognitive theory, uses and gratifications, limited capacity of cognition, affective disposition, and excitation transfer.

Not all youth are equally susceptible to the influence of media. Yet despite this truth, the idea that media and technology have large effects on all children and teens often prevails in contemporary discourse. This chapter reviews media effects theories from the early twentieth century onward. It clarifies what we do and do not know about the influence of media on youth. When are media effects large, and when are they small? And what do “small” and “large” effects mean, exactly? And which children and teens are especially susceptible to media effects, and why?

This chapter discusses what role the media agenda has played in (comparative) agenda research. Studies into the characteristics of the media agenda demonstrate that, compared to other agendas, the media agenda is characterized by high levels of responsiveness and volatility and that various outlets that jointly constitute the agenda strongly influence each other. In recent years, a vast amount of research has considered the impact of the media agenda on the parliamentary agenda (political agenda-setting) and how the size of this impact depends on a wide variety of contingent factors. Our empirical example uncovers considerable overlap in media agendas across various Western European countries, reflecting the importance of the international context in the construction of news.

Mass media has taken on an increasingly influential role with respect to the design, implementation and critical evaluation of public policy. This chapter explores the many ways in which media “matters” to the policy process, by highlighting media’s traditionally limited role in the scholarly literature on public policy, then moving on to a wider discussion of the direct and indirect capacity of media to influence the policy process. Media effects on policy such as framing and agenda setting are reviewed, as are concepts such as the institutional factors that guide political media production and the relationship between policymakers, public opinion and the media. The chapter concludes with a reflection on some of the contemporary challenges for the media-policy relationship in a rapidly evolving digital media environment.

The aim of this chapter is to review research on the status of females in one cultural industry: popular films. To this end, the content analytic work on gender roles in motion picture content is reviewed. The goal of this section is to document the portrayal of females and males on the silver screen. Given the infrequency and stereotyping of females, the second section focuses on reasons for these skewed depictions. Rather than relying on the press, anecdotal evidence, or speculation, the results of a recent qualitative study interviewing over 100 industry leaders about gender hegemony in popular studio films are delineated. The third section focuses on effects. In light of content patterns, the last segment of the chapter covers research on the consequences of consuming stereotypical and/or sexualized cinematic content on youth.

This chapter discusses the development of media effects research. It examines how demands for information influence not only the content of news but also the ability of the news to influence the public and its leaders. Evidence suggests that the news media greatly impact the public's political opinions and behaviors. Perhaps the most broadly accepted and studied impact of the news is its ability to set the audience's issue agenda. In this scenario, news outlets report issues, and the public subsequently views those issues as important. This represents a very powerful effect, and a multitude of studies have lent credence to this paradigm, called “agenda-setting.” The chapter explains how audience demands affect news issue content and therefore mediate the agenda-setting impact that news outlets could potentially have on audiences.

To understand how social media can contribute to political participation, research must first investigate the extent to which individuals experience political content on these platforms. Second, we need to understand whether and how these experiences and their effects differ among different types of users—such as those with different levels of political involvement and different ideological preferences. Finally, we need to know how these relationships are shaped by systemic factors that vary across countries—such as patterns of electoral competition, characteristics of media systems, and the strength of party organizations. The theoretical framework presented in this chapter overcomes three theoretical and empirical fallacies that have limited researchers’ ability to understand the relationship between social media and political participation. These fallacies inaccurately suggest that platforms’ affordances are a destiny that inevitably shapes outcomes, that the effects of social media are uniform among different groups of users rather than varying based on their specific characteristics, and that contextual features and systemic factors do not play any relevant role.

In Chapter 3, communications scholar Robert C. Hornik gives a brief history of the health communications field and outlines insights and pitfalls relevant to human rights communications efforts. In addition to ensuring that messages are well-tailored to and will receive sufficient attention in the target audience, he also outlines several counterintuitive findings including the need to be mindful of “boomerang effects”—the risk that any given communication will, in fact, worsen the behaviors the message was intended to fix.

The media play an important role as a source of information during European Parliament elections. Generally speaking, there is a positive relationship between being exposed to news about the European Union, and in particular positive news, and pro‐EU attitudes. However, this influence of individual exposure to EU news is less strong in countries that have a lot of EU news anyway. Thus, a dampening effect of contextual EU news visibility is seen on the impact of individual exposure to EU news. While it may be an intended—and in part successful—consequence of EP elections to generate news, the impact of this coverage of EU attitudes is less straightforward.

The media (e.g., Internet, television, video games, music, movies, magazines) play a prominent role in the lives of emerging adults today. This chapter identifies and categorizes various intersections between media practice and religious mosaics in the lives of emerging adults. The religious mosaics metaphor conveys the complex, dynamic, and sometimes contradictory nature of emerging adults’ religiousness and spiritualities. The Media Practice Model is used to structure the chapter, organizing theoretical principles and research findings. The chapter focuses on three “moments” that correspond to three sets of media practices. First, selection concerns the determinants of media use. Second, engagement encompasses processing mechanisms during exposure to media messages. Both selection and engagement may be shaped by the media users’ religious mosaics. Lastly, application concerns the incorporation of media messages into religious mosaics, or the production and distribution of religious and secular media messages via social media.

This chapter explores the effect of the interplay of personal characteristics and news coverage on issue salience during the 2009 to 2015 period and during the election campaign in 2013. We selected four topics that played a considerable role during this period: the labor market, pensions and healthcare, immigration, and the financial crisis. The evidence from pooled cross-sectional data and panel data supports the notion that news coverage affects citizens’ issue salience. For obtrusive issues, news coverage does not play as large a role as for rather remote topics like the financial crisis and immigration. The results also lend credence to the idea that political predilections and other individual differences are related to issue salience and constrain the impact of news coverage on voters’ issue salience. However, the evidence for the interplay of individual differences and media coverage proved mild at best.

This chapter maps several lines of academic inquiry that speak to the yet unrealized field of conservative news studies. The chapter explores how scholars have approached the notion of “liberal bias” and conservative news; three different approaches to studying the influence of conservative media—as propaganda, as media effects, and as “deep stories”; and the place of media in historical accounts of the growth of modern conservatism in the United States. Scholars have been researching various components of conservative news cultures for decades, but disciplinary silos, differing methodological assumptions, and a lack of standardized terminology have precluded the sort of focused scholarly dialogue that typically constitutes a field. This chapter highlights the extant disciplinary and interdisciplinary debates that a field of conservative news studies would ideally weave together and build upon.

This chapter examines media effects, communication, and complexity science insights on games for learning. More specifically, it considers how a communication perspective can contribute to research on games for learning. It first provides an overview of traditions of media effects research before turning to a discussion of communication research on media use and media messages. In particular, it explores the concept of “uses and gratifications,” user control, and the dynamic effects of formal features. It also describes dynamical systems and how science can inform the design of educational games.

Throughout Cyberwar, Jamieson argues that taken together the Russian interventions, including press use of the hacked content, troll messaging, disinformation, and the changes in the media and campaign agendas, were sufficient to probably have affected the 2016 Electoral College outcome. Part Five responds to critics who challenge that conclusion. In the process, it examines the controversies over what we know about the nature, extent, timing, targets, and impact of the Russian attacks and their effects.