1/13: Dave Ewoldsen: Cooperative Competitive Game Play: A Research Agenda
1/20: Journal club: Schrodt, P., Witt, P. L., & Messersmith, A. S. (2008). A Meta-analytic review of family communication patterns and their associations with information processing, behavioral, and psychosocial outcomes. Communication Monographs, 75, 248-269.
1/27: Brad Bushman: Does Self-Love or Self-Hate Lead to Violence?
It has been widely asserted that low self-esteem causes violence, but laboratory evidence is lacking, and some contrary observations have characterized aggressors as narcissistic individuals having inflated, grandiose self-views (e.g., Hitler probably did not have low self-esteem). In experimental studies involving college students, we measured both simple self-esteem and narcissism and then gave individual subjects an opportunity to aggress against someone who had insulted them or praised them, or against an innocent third person. Self-esteem proved irrelevant to aggression. The combination of narcissism and insult led to exceptionally high levels of aggression toward the source of the insult. Neither form of self-regard affected displaced aggression, which was low in general. Similar results were found in a recent experiment involving 10-13 year old children. In a meta-analysis, we compare self-esteem and narcissism scores for violent male prisoners who had murdered, assaulted, raped, or robbed someone, and nonviolent males the same age. Violent prisoners had much higher narcissism scores than the nonviolent men did, but self-esteem scores were similar for the two groups. These findings contradict the popular view that low self-esteem causes aggression and point instead toward threatened egotism as an important cause. Unfortunately, narcissism scores are increasing over time (at least in American college students). Fortunately, experiments show that narcissistic aggression can be reduced by increasing the psychological overlap between the narcissist and the victim. Narcissists love themselves, and if someone else is like them, they are reluctant to aggress against that person. A 1-week longitudinal study also shows that make self-esteem more stable and secure can reduce narcissistic aggression.
2/3: CJ Lee: The Role of Social Capital in Public Health Communication Campaigns: The Case of the Anti-Drug Media Campaign
Using a two-round longitudinal panel dataset from the National Survey of Parents and Youth (NSPY), I examined the roles of antidrug-related community activities at both individual and aggregate levels in the National Youth Anti-Drug Media Campaign. I found a main effect of parent's antidrug-specific community activities on targeted parent-child communication about drugs. More interestingly, parents who did not actively participate in antidrug-related community activities were more likely to talk about drugs with their offspring after being exposed to the antidrug campaign ads than were their counterparts. In contrast, there was little evidence for a contextual effect of aggregate-level antidrug-specific community activities on targeted parent-child communication or for its cross-level interaction with campaign exposure. I will discuss the implications of these findings for communication research and public health intervention efforts.
2/10: Angela Palmer-Wackerly: Dancing around Infertility: The Use of Metaphors in a Complex Medical Situation
2/17: Katey Price: Identifying Uncertainty: Changing Roles for Dementia Family Caregivers and Ambiguous Identity
2/24: Susan Kline
3/2: Comm 820 students
