René Weber
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View article: Brain activity explains message effectiveness: A mega-analysis of 16 neuroimaging studies
Brain activity explains message effectiveness: A mega-analysis of 16 neuroimaging studies Open
Persuasive communication in marketing, political, and health domains influences sales, elections, and public health. We present a mega-analysis (a pooled analysis of raw data) of 16 functional MRI datasets (572 participants, 739 messages, …
Psychopathology and Gaming Disorder in Adolescents Open
Importance Although gaming disorder is recognized as a diagnosable behavioral addiction, uncertainty remains regarding its directional association with adolescent psychopathology. Clarifying this association is crucial for refining diagnos…
Exploring Neural Idiosyncrasies in Response to Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response Videos: Naturalistic Functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging Study of Stress and Sensory Processing Open
Background Autonomous sensory meridian response (ASMR) videos have been increasingly popularized as accessible tools for stress relief. Despite widespread media coverage promoting their benefits, empirical research on the neural mechanisms…
How should we approach negative news in the media? A ‘mindful’ and ‘harmonious’ consumption of negative news by users might be an answer Open
The prevalence of negative sentiment in news content appears to have increased over time. This trend has raised concerns about the potential challenges associated with consuming negative news, particularly when it is consumed frequently. I…
Highlighting the Role of Morality in News Framing and Its Short-Term Effects on Stock Market Fluctuations Open
The Model of Intuitive Morality and Exemplars (MIME) suggests that news audiences, including investors, evaluate news based on their moral frames, and that these moral evaluations shape behavior. We extracted moral signals from 382,185 new…
Autonomous Sensory Meridian Response (ASMR) Videos Are Popular Among Young Adults but Likely Not Effective as a Stress-Relief Treatment Option (Preprint) Open
BACKGROUND The potential of using online media content as an efficient and affordable alternative to mental health care depends on the ability to identify and select content that offers therapeutic benefits. Autonomous Sensory Meridian Res…
Digital Media, Cognition, and Brain Development in Adolescence Open
Drawing from the literature on adolescent cognitive development, we describe how digital media usage has been linked to cognitive control processes, including the regulation of affective responses. In addition, we highlight how digital med…
View article: Computational modeling of the relationship between morphological heterogeneity and functional responses in mouse hippocampal astrocytes
Computational modeling of the relationship between morphological heterogeneity and functional responses in mouse hippocampal astrocytes Open
Recent studies indicate that astrocytes show heterogeneity in morphology and physiological function. They integrate synaptic signals and release calcium in reaction to active neurons. These calcium signals are not yet fully understood as t…
Cognitive and perceptual load have opposing effects on brain network efficiency and behavioral variability in ADHD Open
Attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD) is a highly prevalent neurodevelopmental disorder associated with suboptimal outcomes throughout the life-span. Extant work suggests that ADHD-related deficits in task performance may be magn…
Moral Foundations Elicit Shared and Dissociable Cortical Activation Modulated by Political Ideology Open
Moral Foundations Theory (MFT) holds that moral judgments are driven by modular and ideologically variable moral foundations, but where and how they are represented in the brain and shaped by political beliefs remains an open question. Usi…
Reproducing FSL's fMRI data analysis via Nipype: Relevance, challenges, and solutions Open
The “replication crisis” in neuroscientific research has led to calls for improving reproducibility. In traditional neuroscience analyses, irreproducibility may occur as a result of issues across various stages of the methodological proces…
Mapping Attention Across Multiple Media Tasks Open
Successful media processing requires that an individual attend to relevant information embedded among numerous competing stimuli. In communication research, this process is often referred to as resource allocation. Although the factors tha…
Representations of Racial Minorities in Popular Movies Open
In the Hollywood film industry, racial minorities remain underrepresented. Characters from racially underrepresented groups receive less screen time, fewer central story positions, and frequently inherit plotlines, motivations, and actions…
Does Regional Variation in Pathogen Prevalence Predict the Moralization of Language in COVID-19 News? Open
While there is substantial research on COVID-19’s general framing in the news, little is known about the antecedents and moderators of using moral language in communicating the disease to audiences. In this study, we rely on the Model of I…
View article: Individual Differences in Brain Responses: New Opportunities for Tailoring Health Communication Campaigns
Individual Differences in Brain Responses: New Opportunities for Tailoring Health Communication Campaigns Open
Prevention neuroscience investigates the brain basis of attitude and behavior change. Over the years, an increasingly structurally and functionally resolved “persuasion network” has emerged. However, current studies have only identified a …
A Practical Introduction to Network Neuroscience for Communication Researchers Open
The increasing adoption of brain imaging methods has greatly augmented our understanding of the neural underpinnings of communication processes. Enabled by recent advancements in mathematics and computational infrastructure, researchers ha…
A Graph-Learning Approach for Detecting Moral Conflict in Movie Scripts Open
Moral conflict is central to appealing narratives, but no methodology exists for computationally extracting moral conflict from narratives at scale. In this article, we present an approach combining tools from social network analysis and n…
Dynamic Transactions Between News Frames and Sociopolitical Events: An Integrative, Hidden Markov Model Approach Open
A central goal of news research is to understand the interplay between news coverage and sociopolitical events. Although a great deal of work has elucidated how events drive news coverage, and how in turn news coverage influences societal …
View article: An Agenda for Open Science in Communication
An Agenda for Open Science in Communication Open
In the last 10 years, many canonical findings in the social sciences appear unreliable. This so-called “replication crisis” has spurred calls for open science practices, which aim to increase the reproducibility, replicability, and general…
View article: Prevention Neuroscience and Individual Differences
Prevention Neuroscience and Individual Differences Open
The field of prevention neuroscience is organized around understanding the neural mechanisms that underpin health attitude and behavior change. Numerous studies demonstrate that neural activity in response to persuasive messages can accura…
Modality-Specific Effects of Perceptual Load in Multimedia Processing Open
Digital media are sensory-rich, multimodal, and often highly interactive. An extensive collection of theories and models within the field of media psychology assume the multimodal nature of media stimuli, yet there is current ambiguity as …
A Roadmap for Computational Communication Research Open
Computational Communication Research (CCR) is a new open access journal dedicated to publishing high quality computational research in communication science. This editorial introduction describes the role that we envision for the journal. …
iCoRe: The GDELT Interface for the Advancement of Communication Research Open
This article introduces the interface for communication research (iCoRe) to access, explore, and analyze the Global Database of Events, Language and Tone (GDELT; Leetaru & Schrodt, 2013). GDELT provides a vast, open source, and constantly …
A Roadmap for Computational Communication Research Open
Computational Communication Research (CCR) is a new open access journal dedicated to publishing high quality computational research in communication science. This editorial introduction describes the role that we envision for the journal. …