Informed by the modified structural influence model, we conducted a secondary data analysis of the 2022 Health Information National Trends Survey 6 (HINTS 6; N = 6,046) to examine how satisfaction with internet quality, as an indicator of technological accessibility, may be associated with disparities in telehealth use and healthcare outcomes, including perceived quality of healthcare and delay of care. The moderating role of patient-centered communication (PCC) was also examined. Results showed that internet satisfaction positively predicted telehealth use. Telehealth use was not significantly associated with perceived quality of healthcare and was positively associated with delay of care. Additionally, PCC had a significant main effect on perceived quality of care. Our findings indicate that access to technology is an important determinant of telehealth use, highlighting that telehealth may not be a viable option for people with poor internet access. Results also indicate that the interpersonal component of PCC still plays a critical role in determining patients' perceptions of healthcare quality.
Transgender individuals face challenges to their social and emotional quality of life (QoL). Disclosure of their identity is often recognized as one way to improve well-being. However, fear of stigmatization can decrease transgender identity self-disclosure, causing deleterious health outcomes. This reality reveals a need to extend the disclosure decision-making model (DD-MM;) by examining "responsiveness," or responses to disclosure of a stigmatized identity that are perceived as validating, understanding, and caring. We use multiple regression analysis and simple mediation analysis to understand surveys from 209 self-identifying transgender individuals, examining the relationships between perceptions of stigmatization, disclosure of transgender identity, positive responsiveness to that disclosure, and social and emotional quality of life. Our findings show that transgender stigma is associated with decreased self-disclosure and harms both social and emotional QoL. Stigma is also negatively associated with perceived responsiveness. Responsiveness to identity disclosure mediates the relationships between disclosure and social and emotional QoL. Thus, disclosing information related to transgender identity improves social and emotional QoL if the response is seen as validating, understanding, or caring. Suggestions are offered for applying these findings to interactions with members of the transgender community.
This exploratory, cross-sectional study examines associations between individual differences in entertainment media motivations (hedonic and eudaimonic), narrative engageability, entertainment genre preferences, and conspiracy belief. Drawing on research suggesting that conspiracy theories may serve epistemic and existential functions similar to those gratified by certain forms of entertainment, we tested a parallel mediation model in which genre preferences mediate relationships between motivational and narrative engageability orientations and conspiracy belief. Using a U.S. adult sample (N = 399), we found that preferences for excitement- and suspense-oriented media (e.g. action, crime, thriller, horror, mystery) were significantly associated with conspiracy belief. Significant indirect effects emerged through genre preferences, with ease of accepting unrealism and suspense/curiosity propensity relating to conspiracy belief via preferences for suspense-oriented media. Hedonic motivation also showed a direct positive association with conspiracy belief, consistent with the proposition that conspiracy theories possess entertainment value. Results suggest that the narrative ecosystems individuals inhabit - shaped by motivational orientations and narrative processing tendencies - may relate to openness to conspiratorial thinking. The design is cross-sectional, thus findings reflect patterns of association rather than causal effects.
Social gaze is central to interaction regulation, yet its study has been constrained by the challenges of measuring it dyadically in face-to-face communication. To bridge this gap, we introduce and validate an automated analysis pipeline combining eye-tracking with computer vision. Following a pilot validation of the hardware's precision, we applied this method to a study of dyads interacting in cooperative (rapport-building) and competitive (hierarchical conflict) contexts. Our automated analysis replicated key nonverbal benchmarks, specifically the speaker-listener gaze asymmetry and typical gaze durations, but with superior temporal precision. Furthermore, the analysis revealed how social context reconfigures these dynamics, with conflict scenarios significantly increasing mutual silence and altering turn-taking structures. This work shifts the analytic lens from aggregate summaries to the continuous, moment-to-moment dance of social attention.
"Networked intimacy" has been used to frame research about online relationships. Despite its heuristic value, networked intimacy remains far less explored than other network(ed) constructs like network society, networked individualism, and networked self. To fill this gap, the current study forwarded the perspective of post visibility (i.e., the visibility of posts from a social media "friend") and explored how the behavior of unsubscribing from the posts of social media friends (i.e., unfollowing) shapes networked intimacy. Twenty-nine semi-structured interviews were conducted with young users of WeChat Moments, a networking feature of WeChat. Our informants expect posts from their WeChat friends to be "meaningful," judged by at least three criteria: political value alignment, online-offline consistency, and potential for reciprocity. By unfollowing WeChat friends whose posts do not meet these expectations, our informants negotiate relational boundaries and promote meaningful connections on Moments. Our study highlights a valuable post-centered approach to understanding the ebb and flow of social media connections.
Prior rhetorical research suggests that humans grapple with death through media, popular culture, and interactions with technology. This essay details a rhetorical cogitation on mortality and existence surrounding a popular and long-running mobile game's "sunset," or end, through examining online media articles reporting on The Simpsons Tapped Out (TSTO) mobile game sunsetting process. As human life becomes increasingly technology-mediated, and research expands in this area, how relationships between humans and technology are represented rhetorically warrants attention. This essay offers a twofold loss framing of the game that goes beyond a technology-based object to reflect a place and a companion. Language on mortality and existence appears when digital content, including the game and the curated and potentially purchased content within it, is lost. As previous rhetorical research suggests that humans seek to circumvent death via technology, this essay broadens that rhetorical understanding to include the loss of digital content.
This study evaluated the impact of a health-framed message and an environment-framed message on individuals' intention to reduce beef consumption using data from a sample of U.S. adults recruited through CloudResearch Connect (N = 508). Both personal risk perception and planetary risk perception were evaluated. Results indicated that self-efficacy interacted with planetary risk perception to influence consumption intention. Thus, simple, tangible steps need to be provided to encourage people to limit beef consumption, especially when its environmental impacts are highlighted. We also used the risk perception attitude framework to categorize the participants into four attitudinal groups based on their risk perception and efficacy beliefs. Our findings indicate that consumption intent is generally higher when the risk is framed in terms of personal (health) risk rather than planetary (environmental) risk. However, this effect varies depending on the group's risk attitudes, with responsive individuals showing strongest intention and indifferent individuals exhibiting consistently low intention. These findings suggest that nuanced communication interventions are needed to target different attitudinal groups.
This study explores end-of-life communication through final conversations that occurred between family members during the COVID-19 pandemic and their grief responses. 62 participants who lost a loved one during COVID-19 completed an online mixed-method survey. Quantitative results indicated that nearly three-quarters of participants (71.64%) reported being unable to have a final conversation with their loved one, and many identified significant barriers such as hospital visitation restrictions and technological limitations that restricted conversations. These constraints hindered opportunities to express love, resolve relational issues, or achieve closure with their dying loved one. Qualitative analysis further revealed the emotional toll of disrupted communication, particularly when families were unable to be present or say goodbye. Themes such as uncertainty during the illness trajectory, barriers to saying goodbye, emotional and grief responses, and disrupted rituals and meaning-making were prominent across responses. The findings illustrate the profound impact of disrupted end-of-life communication on bereavement outcomes. This study contributes to a growing literature on final conversations by documenting how pandemic-era constraints altered familial connection and meaning-making at the end of life. Implications extend beyond COVID-19, offering direction for improving communication support in healthcare settings during future crises and situations involving restricted access to dying loved ones.
Cultural targeting involves designing messages to align with surface or deep-cultural elements with the goal of enhancing message relevance and impact. Methodological challenges remain in experimentally manipulating messages that are congruent with the cultural characteristics of receivers while measuring effects and balancing experimental control and realism; as such, we know very little about mechanisms that explain cultural targeting effects. The current study focuses on the effects of matching messages to self-reported racial identity as a design element of culturally targeted messages. The study used a novel virtual reality-based paradigm in which participants drove along a virtual highway with billboards that portrayed people who either matched or mismatched their racial identity. Using eye-tracking, we observed that participants paid more attention to culturally matched billboards, both in frequency and duration. Results also indicated better recall for matched billboards, suggesting more effective message encoding and storage. This underscores the potential of cultural targeting for health communication and other messaging contexts. More broadly, this study points to new ways for studying communication processes and outcomes with the aid of virtual reality manipulations and biobehavioral measures.
Grounded in the communicative ecology model of successful aging, this study examined older adults' dispositional hope (comprised of agency and pathways hope) as a moderator of the associations between their own age-related communication and aging efficacy. Three-hundred U.S. American adults aged 50 and older (62.0% female, 83.0% European American, MAge = 59.74 years, SDAge = 7.85 years) completed a survey about their own age-related communication, aging efficacy, and dispositional hope. Four profiles of age-related communication emerged: engaged, disengaged, bantering, and gloomy agers. Dispositional hope moderated how the probabilities of being engaged and bantering agers were associated with aging efficacy: The probability of being an engaged ager was positively associated with efficacy for adults with high agency and pathways hope but not associated with efficacy for adults with low agency and pathways hope. Further, the probability of being a bantering ager was positively associated with efficacy for adults with low agency and pathways hope. The probability of being a bantering ager was not associated with efficacy for adults with high agency hope, but was negatively associated with efficacy for adults with high pathways hope. The study illuminates contingencies under which age-related communication is associated with aging efficacy.
Building off prior research on entertainment-education and narrative persuasion, the present study compares a narrative story featuring inclusive behaviors toward gay men (that are rewarded) to one featuring homophobic, exclusive behaviors toward gay men (that are punished). Drawing from reinforcement learning models, mediated intergroup theory, and the theory of reasoned action, we predict that the reward-based story will be more effective than the punishment-based story at impacting inclusive behaviors in an experiment. One hundred sixty U.S. adults were randomly assigned to read a short story that featured either a reward or a punishment condition. Results revealed that those in the reward condition were more likely (versus punishments) to adopt inclusive injunctive norms about gay men, which in turn had an effect on behavioral intentions to intervene when witnessing homophobic behaviors.
This research examines how organizational members communicatively construct and enact employee resilience within the challenging context of public education. Using one-on-one interviews with 28 educators and drawing from asset-based community development (ABCD) approaches, this study investigates how resilience emerges through communicative practices. The purpose is: (1) to understand how organizational members construct and enact employee resilience through their talk and stories, and (2) to extend the Communication Theory of Resilience through an empirical investigation of an organizational context. An iterative, thematic analysis revealed that employee resilience emerges through two novel communicative processes: 1) affirmative sensemaking - whereby organizational members transform past adversity into present resilience resources through positive retrospective framing and storytelling and 2) critical co-reflexivity - a collaborative process that moves beyond individual reflection to collective meaning-making through ongoing dialogue, transforming individual understanding into collective capacity. These processes operate within a continuous communicative loop where individual stories become collective resources. This study makes three significant theoretical contributions to the Communication Theory of Resilience: identifying affirmative sensemaking as a distinct communicative process, introducing critical co-reflexivity as a novel form of collaborative reflection, and revealing how these processes operate within a communicative loop.
An individual's perception of their relationship may influence whether they sext (i.e. send sexually suggestive text, photo, or video messages) with their relational partner. A sample of adults (N = 199) collected from Prolific responded to an online survey about sexting behaviors and individual differences (e.g. relationship status, attachment style). Hierarchical regression results revealed that avoidant individuals were less likely to engage in text-based sexting. Avoidant and anxious attachment related to greater uncertainty in one's relationship and greater sexting uncertainty. Relationship uncertainty was associated with reduced engagement in sexting, whereas uncertainty with sexting negatively related to self-esteem and sexual gratification. Analyses of covariance suggested single individuals experienced greater relationship and sexting uncertainty compared to those in committed relationships. Implications for future studies relating sexting, attachment, and uncertainty are considered.
This study examined identity management processes in interfaith parent - child communication in China. Drawing on the Communication Theory of Identity (CTI), a thematic analysis revealed that Chinese Christians experience identity gaps across relational and communal identity layers. The study introduced two collaborative strategies, partner engagement and interpersonal adaptation, to support the relational nature of navigating identity gaps. The study also highlights the integration of identity layers through the processes of aligning and transforming. This study contributes to CTI's theoretical development and integrates with intergroup theorizing through communication practices such as accommodative communication, perspective-taking, and the creation of a common ingroup identity.
The prevalence of mental health issues in Ghanaian celebrity culture has become increasingly concerning, as evidenced by public interviews. Mental health is foundational to human interaction and cognition, yet it remains a neglected area in Ghanaian society. This study, guided by Stigma Management Communication Theory, explored how Ghanaian celebrities navigate the stigma surrounding their mental health disorders. Data were collected via semi-structured individual interviews with 20 Ghanaian celebrities and analyzed through the phronetic iterative approach. The study identified prayer as a distinctive strategy for privately managing mental health stigma, repositioning stigma management as not only a social or public practice between people but also one that can involve private religious prayers through dialogue with God. In doing so, the findings expand Stigma Management Communication theory by introducing a culturally specific strategy, offering new theoretical insights and practical implications for mental health advocacy and communication in Ghana.
This manuscript reports the results of a study that examined the effects of instructor feedback on students and perceptions of instructor credibility. Specifically, undergraduate students (N = 466) participated in an online pretest posttest experiment in which they completed pretest measures of their self-efficacy and affect, read feedback from a hypothetical instructor, then completed posttest measures of the same variables as well as ratings of the scenario instructor's credibility. Experimental manipulations varied the type of feedback (praise, criticism, and combined praise and criticism) as well as the extent of detail the feedback contained (basic explanations vs. detailed explanations). Results revealed both experimental treatment and feedback type effects on student self-efficacy and affect as well as consequences for instructor credibility based on feedback type and extent of feedback detail. These results are discussed in the context of instructional communication, with a focus on their practical applications in the classroom.
The hyperperception model (Carpenter & Spottswood, 2021a) makes predictions about when an observer of others' social media interactions may be misperceived. We used this model to make predictions about when observing the social media interactions of others will be associated with loneliness. Two studies (N = 748 & N = 245) found that the extent to which one's friends appear to be interacting more with each other relative to how much they interact with oneself was positively associated with loneliness. The effect was enhanced by those with high network awareness in Study 1 and enhanced by perceptions of the affordance of accessibility in Study 2. The data were consistent with the utility of the model.
