Center Research Projects

Supplemental Materials for Articles Published by Center Affiliates

Listed below are some of the many research projects currently under way at the Center

Prosocial (E/I) Programming and Children
Marie-Louise Mares and various collaborators
This is an ongoing project with numerous parts.
- With Emory Woodard (Temple University), a meta-analysis of prior research on prosocial effects.
- A study of the effects of repeated exposure to a film on children’s ability to understand what was going on and extract the moral lessons.
- With her research team, a study of kindergarten children’s comprehension of an episode of Clifford the Big Red Dog in which the characters learn to be tolerant.
- Upcoming research will look at ways of increasing comprehension of pro-tolerance programming and will examine the effectiveness of such programming in reducing children’s prejudice.

Aging and Media Use
Marie-Louise Mares and various collaborators
Again, this is an ongoing area of research with various parts.
- With Emory Woodard, using General Social Survey data to explore the effects of age, period, and cohort on amount of daily TV viewing.
- With Mary Beth Oliver (Penn State) and Joanne Cantor, a study of age differences in the types of emotional experiences people seek out while using media.
- With graduate student Emily Acosta, a project on life-span changes in the effects of media on body image and satisfaction.
- A project on chronological vs. subjective age as a predictor of media preferences.

Miscommunication
C. David Mortensen
Professor Mortensen's current research examines conflict, miscommunication, and problematic talk in social and personal relationships. His recent book, Understanding Human Misunderstanding (Rowman & Littlefield, in press) explores the hidden costs of disagreement and misunderstanding. Ongoing research explores the place of conceptual imperatives and dialogical tensions in the social construction of argument, dispute, and conflict.

The Media-Induced Fears of Elementary School Children
Joanne Cantor, Sahara Bryne, Emily Moyer-Guse, and Karyn Riddle
This study involved face-to-face interviews with kindergarten and first graders and written questionnaires filled out by second through sixth graders in which they talked about the television shows and movies that have frightened them. Most previous studies have asked adults to recollect their earlier experiences or have asked for parental descriptions of their children’s responses. The responses involve the fear symptoms they experienced and their methods of coping. In addition, the study relates various family and home characteristics to children’s responses.

Framing Social Security Reforms
Zhongdang Pan
This project aims to explore the rise and fall of the debate on social security reforms as well as its discursive characteristics during the Bush presidency. It involves content analyzing the news coverage of the issue by major news outlets as well as the wording and response categories employed in numerous public opinion polls.

Political Advertising in the Mobilization of Political Talk
Zhongdang Pan and Mike Xenos
This project involves analyzing the combined time-series data from the Wisconsin Advertising Project and the Annenberg National Election Surveys to examine the dynamics of political talk among voters during the 2004 presidential campaign.

Representations of the Nation-State on TV
Zhongdang Pan
This project analyzes three TV shows, each representing a particular genre, in China. The focus is on how these shows depict China as a nation and state. In different ways, these shows function as a mirror for Chinese TV viewers to see themselves and for others to view China. Embedded in such representations are elements of xenophobic nationalism. As China grows its economic power, its xenophobic strand of nationalism could be a major threat to the changing global order.

Message-Effect Perception and Deliberation
Zhongdang Pan, Mike Xenos and graduate students
Extending previous studies with graduate students on the third-person effect idea, this project is designed to test psychological mechanisms of the third-person perception and to explore the role of such perceptual asymmetry in a deliberation on some controversial issues.

Group memory
Lyn van Swol
Examining how groups pool individual memories into a collaborative product. Examining biases that groups have with memory and the tendency to exaggerate individual memory biases.

Judge-advisor system and information sharing
Lyn van Swol
Examing how structuring a group as a judge advisor system increases the discussion of unshared information. A judge advisor system is a group in which one person has decision power and the other group members act as advisors to the decision-maker. This stands in contrast to unstructured groups.