It’s More Than Self-Presentation: MUM Effects Can Reflect Private Discomfort and Concern for the Recipient

Is the reluctance to share bad news (i.e., the MUM effect) motivated more by a public display or private concern, and does it benefit mainly the messenger or the recipient? An experiment (N = 309) that crossed good/bad news with three communication channels (face-to-face, text messaging, e-mail) revealed that messenger reluctance was greatest under conditions of bad news and did not vary based on the channel through which the recipient contacted the messenger. In contrast with earlier work, this MUM effect was more consistent with a private fear of distressing the recipient. Theoretical implications and limitations are discussed.     

Co-rumination and Immune Inflammatory Response in Healthy Young Adults: Associations with Interleukin-6 and C-Reactive Protein

A rich literature exists reinforcing the notion that both perceived and received social support has stress ameliorating and protective benefits both psychologically and physiologically. However, recent literature suggests that excessive dyadic negative problem talk about an issue, a phenomenon labeled co-rumination, may reverse much of the beneficial effects of social support. Healthy young adults participated in a laboratory research study exploring the associations between co-rumination and immune system inflammatory response. Partial correlations indicated a positive association between co-rumination and C-reactive protein and a negative association between co-rumination and interleukin-6 after controlling for stress, anxiety, and temperature. Discussion focuses on the means by which co-rumination may lead to negative health outcomes.     

Investigating married adults’ communal coping with genetic health risk and perceived discrimination

Increased genetic testing in personalized medicine presents unique challenges for couples, including managing disease risk and potential discrimination as a couple. This study investigated couples’ conflicts and support gaps as they coped with perceived genetic discrimination. We also explored the degree to which communal coping was beneficial in reducing support gaps and ultimately stress. Dyadic analysis of married adults (N?=?266, 133 couples), in which one person had the genetic risk for serious illness, showed that perceived discrimination predicted more frequent conflicts about alpha-1 antitrypsin deficiency-related treatment, privacy boundaries, and finances, which, in turn, predicted wider gaps in emotion and esteem support, and greater stress for both spouses. Communal coping predicted lower support gaps for both partners and marginally lower stress.     

The Librarian BFF: A Case Study of a Cohort-Based Personal Librarian Program

This case study presents the development and implementation of a personal librarian program for a cohort-based, executive-style higher education administration doctoral program. Librarians and the program director collaborated to create a student-centered program based on individual research needs. The personal librarian program was designed to build a close relationship between the librarian and individual students; to help identify their research knowledge gaps; and to identify resources to meet each individual students' research needs.     

Applying LDA Topic Modeling in Communication Research: Toward a Valid and Reliable Methodology

ABSTRACT

Latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) topic models are increasingly being used in communication research. Yet, questions regarding reliability and validity of the approach have received little attention thus far. In applying LDA to textual data, researchers need to tackle at least four major challenges that affect these criteria: (a) appropriate pre-processing of the text collection; (b) adequate selection of model parameters, including the number of topics to be generated; (c) evaluation of the model’s reliability; and (d) the process of validly interpreting the resulting topics. We review the research literature dealing with these questions and propose a methodology that approaches these challenges. Our overall goal is to make LDA topic modeling more accessible to communication researchers and to ensure compliance with disciplinary standards. Consequently, we develop a brief hands-on user guide for applying LDA topic modeling. We demonstrate the value of our approach with empirical data from an ongoing research project.     

Investigating the quality of interactions and public engagement around scientific papers on Twitter

This study explores science communication on Twitter by investigating a sample of tweets referring to academic papers in five different scientific fields. The specifications of science communicators on Twitter, the characteristics of those who initiate actions (by tweeting), the extent and quality of reactions (retweeting), individual and group interactions, and the distribution of tweets across types of engagement in the process of science communication (i.e., dissemination, consultation, and evaluation) were explored. A broad array of actors is involved in the communication of science on Twitter, with individual citizens and individual researchers playing an important role. In principle, this is promising for creating direct interaction, which can be difficult through more traditional mass media. The vast majority of communication activities regarding academic papers is undigested dissemination with almost no sign of debate, contestation, or collective reflection. Another general finding of this study is that bot accounts play a major role in the science communication landscape on Twitter.