Communication Research, Ahead of Print. This mixed-methods study investigates whether online vigilance promotes mental fatigue, and whether this effect is greater when under pressure to be available online. Additionally, it examines whether passively sensed smartphone behavior can serve as a digital proxy for online vigilance. Data were collected from 1,315 adult participants, who received 84 experience sampling questionnaires over 14 days, providing 67,762 usable datapoints on individuals’ perceptions of momentary online vigilance, mental fatigue, and availability pressure. Additionally, the ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. Meaningful movies can serve as an anxiety buffer against the fear of death, unless death plays a central role in the movie. This invites the question what happens when death is central to a movie storyline. The present research introduces and tests the so-called fear transcendence route, a second terror management route in which meaningful movies about death invite viewers to virtually confront and transcend their fear of death. Two experiments (N = 206; N = 401) tested three preconditions for fear transcendence, that is, (1) death is salient in real lif ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. This study analyzes survey data from 206 trans workers to test the premises of crystallized self theory by exploring how perceived authenticity and identity communication (i.e., explicit outness, implicit outness, and covering) relate to job and life satisfaction. Perceived authenticity was positively related to explicit outness (overt communication sharing trans identity) and implicit outness (advocacy for trans issues), and negatively to covering (communication distancing from trans identity). Further, in the structural equation model, explicit outness ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. While social media is assumed to exacerbate adolescents’ depressive symptoms, research findings are ambiguous. One way to move the field forward is by looking beyond time spent on social media and considering subjective experiences. The current three-wave longitudinal panel study examines the within- and between-person relations between adolescents’ self-worth dependency on social media feedback and depressive symptoms. About 1,607 adolescents participated in two of the three waves, yet a third had to be excluded due to failing an attention check. Among ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. Given the vast amount of permanently available entertainment content and the high pleasure that viewers derive from it, the question of when and why users disengage from a media entertainment viewing session becomes more pressing. We argue in this paper that communication theories lack a conceptualization of the disengagement part of the communication process. The study presents a novel dynamic view on media use, and argues that specific processes that occur during media exposure contribute to its termination. The assumptions of the theoretical framework ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. Active listening is a promising communication technique to positively affect interactions and communication outcomes. However, theoretical propositions regarding its direct effects on interactions have rarely been empirically investigated. In the present research, we studied the role of naturally occurring active listening in the context of videotaped and coded integrative negotiations. Lag sequential analyses of 48 negotiations with 17,120 thought units show that active listening follows offers that comprise two or more issues (i.e., multi-issue offers ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. The growing adoption of artificial intelligence in journalism has dramatically changed the way news is produced. Despite the recent proliferation of research on automated journalism, debate continues about how audiences perceive and evaluate news purportedly written by machines compared to the work of human authors. Based on a review of 30 experimental studies, this meta-analysis shows that machine authorship had a negative, albeit small, effect on credibility perceptions. Furthermore, machine authorship had a null effect on news evaluations, although th ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. Social media expose users to an abundance of information about various issues. But they also make it difficult for users to assess the quality of this information. If users do not recognize this, they may overestimate their knowledge about those issues. Knowledge overestimation may lead to increased social media engagement and can be linked to attitudes deeming expert knowledge inferior to common sense, such as science-related populist attitudes. We investigate this during the COVID-19 pandemic in two preregistered, cross-sectional survey experiments in ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. Guided by psychological reactance theory, we examined the effects of language features on arousing reactance and communication outcomes. Results of a 2 (controllingness; high/low) × 2 (concreteness; concrete/abstract) × 2 (restoration postscript; present/absent) × 3 (accent; Standard American English [SAE]/Indian [non-SAE]/text-based message) between-subjects design (N = 1,099, studies 1 and 2), revealed high-controlling language increased freedom threat, was perceived as more explicit than low-controlling language. Concrete language was perceived as mor ..read more

Communication Research, Ahead of Print. Research has investigated emotional responses to perceived political incivility but not whether aspects of emotionality may be perceived as uncivil. When politicians display or evoke anger, they may increase democratic participation; however, because manifesting or evoking some negative emotions suggests disrespect—a central component of extant conceptualizations of political incivility—displaying anger and evoking fear and anger may be perceived as aspects of incivility. We test this using confirmatory factor analysis on a national sample of over 2,000 ..read more