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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Politicians' reticence to communicate their views clearly increases the information asymmetry between them and the electorate. This study tested the potential of subtle ideological cues to redress the balance. By spotlighting visual rather than the already much-examined verbal cues, we sought to contribute to building theory on cue effects. Specifically, we aimed to determine whether the effects from the literature on verbal cues could also be shown for visual ones. We used an experiment (N = 361) to test the effects of subtle backdrop cues (SBCs), that is, of visual cues to ideology embedded in the background of political images. We manipulated photos of a fictitious politician to include liberal or conservative SBCs. We embedded these images in Twitter posts and tested whether they influenced perceptions of the politician's ideology and the intention to vote for him. We analyzed the relationship between exposure to SBCs, the politician's perceived political ideology, and voting intention—including the study of conditional effects elicited by cue awareness and ideological consistency between the depicted politician and participant. The conditional process analysis suggested that SBCs mattered, as they influenced citizens' perceptions of a politician's political ideology, and consequently, voting intention. These effects were moderated by cue awareness and ideological consistency. We concluded that SBCs can elicit substantial effects and that their use by politicians is paying off. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Self-injurious behavior is often practiced in secrecy or involves body parts that are easy to hide, making early detection difficult and hampering intervention and treatment. However, cutting, one of the most common intentional forms of nonsuicidal self-injury (NSSI), is relatively often shared publicly via new digital media technologies. We explored NSSI on Instagram through a pioneering combination of two computational methods: First, we developed an automatic image-recognition algorithm that uncovered NSSI (or the absence of NSSI) in digital pictures, and second, we employed web-scraping techniques to obtain all pictures posted on Instagram in a given time frame under four NSSI-related hashtags in English and German. The image-recognition algorithm was then used to explore the relative prevalence of NSSI in these N = 13,132 pictures posted within 48 hr on Instagram under #cutting (n = 4,219), #suicide (n = 7,910), #selbstmord (n = 173), and #ritzen (n = 830) in June 2018. This article not only aims to raise awareness of NSSI on Instagram but also introduces the first automatic image-recognition algorithm that addresses cutting on social media and presents that algorithm's first empirical test run on a large sample of pictures scraped from Instagram. The ultimate goal of this research is to protect vulnerable populations from contact with NSSI-related pictures posted on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the 19th century, suicide rates increased in many countries. The press may have contributed to this increase, even though empirical evidence is lacking in this regard. We assessed suicide statistics within five territories of the Austro-Hungarian Empire between 1871 and 1910 and combined these data with a content analysis of suicide reporting in five newspapers, each appearing in one of the five territories. The analysis revealed a covariation between the quantity of reporting and the number of suicides within all five regions. Furthermore, the quantity of reporting significantly predicted the following year's suicides. Although the causal order of suicides and the quantity of reporting should be assessed with caution, evidence is consistent with the idea that the press may have contributed to the establishment of suicide as a mass phenomenon. The findings also support contemporary guidelines for journalists, especially the notion of avoiding undue repetition of suicide stories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tests were performed to learn whether exposure to news about crimes committed by dark-skinned criminals increases impulsive facial-threat perceptions of meeting dark-skinned strangers in a subsequent situation (media-priming hypothesis), but only when the facial displays are ambiguous (ambiguity hypothesis). The assumption is that news stereotypes prime the “dark-skinned criminal” stereotype, which, in turn, influences subsequent face processing. An experiment with two groups was used to test this prediction. Participants allocated to the treatment group (n = 53) read about crimes committed by dark-skinned criminals. In contrast, for the control group (n = 52), cues indicating skin color were not mentioned at all. As predicted, the treatment increased the perceived facial threat of dark-skinned strangers, but only when the facial displays were ambiguous. Given the importance of the face in social interaction, I discuss important, real-world implications for recipients as well as for journalists and media organizations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We present a dose-response (DR) account of media priming. DR concepts describe the relationship between a dose and the elicited response and, thus, allow us to study dose-dependent media priming effects. We report empirical evidence from an experiment (N = 351) for the DR relationship between exposure to stereotypic newspaper content and readers’ stereotypic social reality estimates. We investigated the change in the media priming effect size by utilizing nine experimentally manipulated dose-conditions (i.e., frequency of the media prime). The empirical data appeared in the form of a Gaussian distribution function: We were able to document (1) a threshold dose, which generally allows us to specify the acceptable daily intake of potentially harmful media content. Furthermore, (2) we found a decline in the effect size at very high dose levels. We argue that a DR account as a supplement to contemporary approaches can be beneficial for media priming research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there is evidence that the media priming effect fades with time, we lack empirical evidence from experimental designs. We investigated the media priming effect of reading crime tabloid articles that overrepresented foreigners as criminals on a subsequent real-world reality judgment (i.e., estimated frequency of criminal foreigners). We utilized a factorial experimental design (N = 465) with the between-subjects factors treatment and temporal delay of the postmeasurement. We found that the media priming effect followed an exponential decay function and that vigilance (i.e., the tendency to intensify the intake and processing of threat-relevant information) moderated the decay. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates how far repeated releases of recommendations for responsible reporting on suicide (RRS) are associated with changes in the quality of suicide reporting. A content analysis was conducted on suicide news articles (N = 606) by the Korean newspapers Hankyoreh Sinmun and Chosun Ilbo in four six-month periods from 2004 to 2019, which covered the periods before and after the releases of three versions of suicide reporting guidelines. Elements for RRS served as a proxy for the reporting quality, which includes both avoiding negative elements and providing positive ones. Not only the number of suicide news stories reduced by half in the last two observation periods, overall RRS scores and most individual RRS elements increased in the third period, compared to the first or second period. The avoidance RRS for headline, however, was not significantly improved. Korean news media also tended to be sensationalistic in using photos. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]