Quality of journalism is not a stable phenomenon, yet there is limited longitudinal evidence. We provide a content analysis of news reporting over a whole century within a specific thematic context: suicide reporting. Quality is a key dimension in this context as low-quality reporting is associated with imitative suicides (Werther effect). We took a historical perspective: suicide rates increased in many countries during the 19th century, with suicide reporting hypothesized as a contributory factor. Conducting the first longitudinal study of journalism quality that examines an entire century, we manually coded  = 14,638 articles. Our analyses indicated a strong nonlinear increase in low-quality reporting. Importantly, a high quantity of low-quality reporting predicted annual increases in suicide rates, a finding which is consistent with the idea of a long-term macro-level media effect. Despite limitations in causal interpretations, the findings support recommendations for high-quality suicide reporting in current media guidelines.

Norm information in media can predict individuals' norm perceptions and, ultimately, their behavior. Little research has examined how descriptive norm information manifests in media and impacts beliefs in the real world. Previously, using automated content analysis, we measured and examined longitudinal trends in two types of descriptive norm information, individual use depictions and population norms, pertaining to tobacco and e-cigarette use across six media sources from 2014-2017. Here, we assess how this norm information affected norm perceptions over time by pairing these data with a rolling cross-sectional survey of young people's beliefs and intentions related to these behaviors. We found that individual use depictions predicted some norm perceptions, although the direction of effects varied depending on the source, behavior, and type of perceptions considered. Population norm content did not affect perceptions. These findings highlight that real-world media norm information has real-world effects, and moderators of these effects should be studied.

We analyze short-term media trust changes during the COVID-19 pandemic, their ideological drivers and consequences based on panel data in German-speaking Switzerland. We thereby differentiate trust in political information from different types of traditional and non-traditional media. COVID-19 serves as a natural experiment, in which citizens' media trust at the outbreak of the crisis is compared with the same variables after the severe lockdown measures were lifted. Our data reveal that (1) media trust is consequential as it is associated with people's willingness to follow Covid-19 regulations; (2) media trust changes during the pandemic, with trust levels for most media decreasing, with the exception of public service broadcasting; (3) trust losses are hardly connected to ideological divides in Switzerland. Our findings highlight that public service broadcasting plays an exceptional role in the fight against a pandemic and that contrary to the US, no partisan trust divide occurs.

In this study, we examined whether adolescents helped others during the COVID-19 pandemic and how stories in the media inspired them in doing so. Using an online daily diary design, 481 younger adolescents ( = 15.29,  = 1.76) and 404 older adolescents ( = 21.48,  = 1.91) were followed for 2 weeks. Findings from linear mixed effects models demonstrated that feelings of being moved by stories in the media were related to giving emotional support to family and friends, and to helping others, including strangers. Exposure to COVID-19 news and information was found to spark efforts to support and help as well and keeping physical distance in line with the advised protective behaviors against COVID-19. Moreover, helping others was related to increased happiness. Overall, the findings of this study highlight the potential role of the media in connecting people in times of crisis.

COVID-19 is a news issue that can be covered from many different angles. When reporting, journalists have to select, accentuate, or exclude particular aspects, which, in turn, may evoke a specific, and possibly constricted, perspective in viewers, a phenomenon termed the news-framing effect. Guided by the reinforcing spiral framework, we conducted a multi-study project that investigated the news-framing effect's underlying mechanism by studying the dynamic of self-reinforcing effects. Grounded in a real-life framing environment observed during the pandemic and systematically assessed via a content analysis (study 1) and survey (study 2), we offer supporting evidence for a preference-based reinforcement model by utilizing a combination of the selective exposure (i.e., self-selected exposure) and causal effects (i.e., forced exposure) paradigms within one randomized controlled study (study 3). Self-selection of news content by viewers was a necessary precondition for frame-consistent (reinforcement) effects. Forced exposure did not elicit causal effects in a frame-consistent direction.

During a public health crisis, government sector is considered the natural leader for overall preparedness and management efforts. Integrating the literature from public relations and public health disciplines, this study proposes a theoretical model to predict individuals' perceptions, communicative action, as well as their behaviors to follow the governments' instructions in the early stages of the COVID-19 outbreak in the United States. Linking relationship management factors and the framework of the situational theory of problem-solving, the findings of this study demonstrate that authentic communication and relational quality can help increase positive perceptual, attitudinal, and behavioral outcomes desired by governments regarding pandemic management. However, our findings suggested that unproductive uses of authentic governmental communication may create adverse effects on publics' perceptions and interpretations and thus pose potential risks, particularly when a public health issue is significantly politicized. Specifically, this study found that, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic in which the Trump administration was blamed for lack of planning and halting responses in the fight against the virus, conservatives who believe that the federal government is practicing authentic communication during the pandemic would consider the issue less important and irreverent; meanwhile, they would recognize more barriers to adopt preventive actions. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

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=2165) to examine whether increasing the vividness of warning labels, using narrative and non-narrative components, increased engagement with the messages, and the subsequent effects of vividness and engagement on intentions to quit smoking. Results showed that more vivid warning labels led to increased engagement, which in turn was linked to increased intentions to quit smoking. Specifically, the indirect effect of vividness on intentions to quit smoking was largely driven by the emotional component of engagement. Indirect effects of cognitive engagement were only apparent at higher levels of vividness.

This study investigates the interdependent relationships between the stock market and economic news in the U.S. context. 2,440 economic tweets from Reuters and Bloomberg published in September 2015 were analyzed within short-term intervals (5 minutes, 20 minutes, and 1 hour) as well as 50 influential Bloomberg market coverage stories distributed via their terminals for the same period of time. Using Vector Auto Regression analyses, it was found that news volume, news relevance, and expert opinion in tweets seem to influence the fluctuation of the Dow Jones Industrial Average (DJI) positively, while economic news appears to respond to market fluctuation with less coverage, including fewer retweets, favorites, updates, or expert opinions conveyed. Inspecting the influential market stories by Bloomberg, the results imply that while Bloomberg terminals provide firsthand information on the market to professionals, tweets rather seem to offer follow-up reporting to the public. Furthermore, given that the effect of economic tweets on the DJI fluctuations was found to be strongest within longer time intervals (i.e., 1 hour), the findings imply that public traders need more time to evaluate information and to make a trading decision than professional investors.

This study introduces the concept of chronic (i.e., repeated and cumulative) mediated exposure to political violence and investigates its effects on aggressive behavior and post-traumatic stress (PTS) symptoms in young viewers. Embracing the risk-matrix approach, these effects are studied alongside other childhood risk factors that influence maladjustment. A longitudinal study was conducted on a sample of youth who experience the Israeli-Palestinian conflict firsthand ( = 1,207). As hypothesized, higher levels of chronic mediated exposure were longitudinally related to higher levels of PTS symptoms and aggression at peers independently of exposure to violence in other contexts. In the case of aggressive behavior, structural equation analysis (SEM) analyses suggest that, while it is likely there are causal effects in both directions, the bigger effect is probably for exposure to violence stimulating aggression than for aggression stimulating exposure to violence. Both the longitudinal effects on aggression and PTS symptoms were especially strong among youth who demonstrated initially higher levels of the same type of maladjustment. These results support the conceptualization of the relation between media violence and behaviors as "reciprocally determined" or "downward spirals" and highlight the contribution of the risk-matrix approach to the analysis of childhood maladjustment.

Using the Integrated Model of Behavioral Prediction, this study examines the effects of exposure to sexual content on television by genre, specifically looking at comedy, drama, cartoon, and reality programs, on adolescents' sex-related cognitions and behaviors. Additionally, we compared the amount and explicitness of sexual content as well as the frequency of risk and responsibility messages in these four genres. Findings show that overall exposure to sexual content on television was not related to teens' engagement in sexual intercourse the following year. When examined by genre, exposure to sexual content in comedies was positively associated while exposure to sexual content in dramas was negatively associated with attitudes regarding sex, perceived normative pressure, intentions, and engaging in sex one year later. Implications of adolescent exposure to various types of content and for using genre categories to examine exposure and effects are discussed.

Cultivation theory and research has been criticized for its failure to consider variation in effects by genre, employ appropriate third-variable controls, and determine causal direction. Recent studies, controlling for a variety of demographic characteristics and media use variables, have found that exposure to local television (TV) newscasts is associated with a variety of problematic "real-world" beliefs. However, many of these studies have not adequately assessed causal direction. Redressing this limitation, we analyzed data from a two-wave national representative survey which permitted tests of lagged association between overall TV viewing, local TV news viewing, and fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention. We first replicated the original cultivation effect and found a positive association between overall TV viewing at time 1 and increased fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention at time 2. Analyses also provided evidence that local TV news viewing at time 1 predicts increased fatalistic beliefs about cancer prevention at time 2. There was little evidence for reverse causation in predicting changes in overall TV viewing or local TV news viewing. The paper concludes with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications of these findings.

Prior research has found strong evidence of a prospective association between R movie exposure and teen smoking. Using parallel process latent-growth modeling, the present study examines prospective associations between viewing of music video channels on television (e.g., MTV and VH-1) and changes over time in smoking and association with smoking peers. Results showed that baseline viewing of music-oriented channels such as MTV and VH-1 robustly predicted increasing trajectories of smoking and of associating with smoking peers, even after application of a variety of controls including parent reports of monitoring behavior. These results are consistent with the arguments from the reinforcing spirals model that such media use serves as a means of developing emergent adolescent social identities consistent with associating with smoking peers and acquiring smoking and other risk behaviors; evidence also suggests that media choice in reinforcing spiral processes are dynamic and evolve as social identity evolves.

Alcohol advertisements may influence impulsive, risky behaviors indirectly, via automatically-activated attitudes toward alcohol. Results from an experiment in which participants were exposed to either four alcohol advertisements, four control advertisements, or four drunk driving public service advertisements, suggested that alcohol advertisements had more measurable effects on implicit, than on explicit attitude measures. Moreover, there were significant indirect paths from alcohol advertisement exposure through automatically-activated alcohol attitudes on willingness to engage in risky alcohol-related behaviors, notably drinking and driving. A mechanism that may explain how these advertisements activate automatic, non-deliberative alcohol attitudes was investigated. Associative evidence was found supportive of an evaluative conditioning mechanism, in which positive responses to an alcohol advertisement may lead to more positive automatically-activated attitudes toward alcohol itself.

This study identifies a theoretical mechanism through which communication with friends about sex influences sexual initiation in a sample of adolescents. The Integrative Model was used to assess the effect of attitudes, normative pressure and self efficacy on intentions to have sex in a sample of virgin adolescents. Results show that the constructs of the theory partially mediated the effect of communication with friends on subsequent sexual initiation. The effect of communication with friends on sexual initiation was not different for males and females. Overall, the results suggest how conversations with friends about sex influence adolescents' intentions to initiate sexual intercourse, which in turn influence subsequent sexual initiation.