How Young,Uninsured Americans Respond to News Coverage of Obamacare: An Experimental Test of an Affective Mediation Model

This experiment integrated theory from multiple domains to examine how aspects of news coverage of the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and differences in participants’ cognitive and emotional contingent conditions interact to shape attitudes and behavioral intentions toward health care legislation. Using a sample of uninsured young adults (N = 1,056), we tested an affective mediation model, which assessed the mechanisms through which media frames, exemplar case studies, and individual predispositions affect this type of news consumer. Results demonstrate the complicated pathways through which emotions mediate the effects of news coverage of ACA based on political predispositions, the need for orientation toward the health care issue, and the influence of equivalency framing in the form of example cases. These findings contribute to a more nuanced explanation of the causal mechanisms underpinning framing effects of public policy news coverage on an understudied population. The need for further examination of emotion along with cognition when investigating framing effects of public policy news is discussed, and the importance of exemplar cases as a significant manifestation of the effects equivalence framing is highlighted.     

The Flood of Film Books Continues

Peter Pollack, The Picture History of Photography (Abrams, $25.00)

David Simon, Fifty Classic Motion Pictures (Crown, $9.95)

David Essoe's The Films of Clark Gable (Citadel, $10.00)

John Springer's The Fondas (Citadel, $10.00)

Pola Negri's Memoirs of a Star (Doubleday, $7.95)

Alexander Walker's Stardom (Stein & Day, $10.00)

T.J. Ross, Film and the Liberal Arts (Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, price unknown)

Lewis Jacob's The Movies as Medium (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $8.95; or Noonday paporback, $3.95)

Benjamin B. Hampton, A History of the Movies, originally published in 1931 and re-issued now as History of the American Film Industry (Dover paporbacks, $4.00)

The Literature of Cinema

Don Slay, Conversations: Volume I (Kaleidoscope Press (Albuquerque, New Mexico), $10.00)

Raymond Durgnat, The Crazy Mirror: Hollywood Comedy and the American Imago (Horizon Press, $7.50)

Harry M. Geduld and Ronald Gottesman's edited collection Serge Eisenstein and Upton Sinclair: Tho Making and Unmaking of “Quo Viva Mexico” (Iniana University gross, $15.00)

Verne and Sylvia Carlson's Professional 16/35 mm Cameraman's Handbook (Hastings House, $15.00)

Julius Bellone's edited collection, Rennaisance of the Film (Collier paperbacks, $2.95)

Richard Randall's excellent Censorship of the Movies (University of Wisconsin Press, $7.95)     

A Six‐Year Longitudinal Study of Texting Trajectories During Adolescence

This study examined growth trajectories of texting (and other media) over a 6‐year time period. Participants were 425 adolescents from Washington, USA (age 13 at Time 1, age 18 at Time 6; 48% male, 68% European American). Analyses suggested a curvilinear pattern for texting and social media use, with rates peaking during midadolescence. There was also considerable heterogeneity in trajectories of texting. A growth mixture model revealed four distinct classes of individuals: perpetuals (14%), decreasers (7%), moderates (68%), and increasers (11%). Higher levels of depression, being a male, and coming from a single‐parent family predicted being a “perpetual” texter. Perpetuals had the most problematic outcomes compared to other classes, including higher depression, anxiety, aggression, and poor relationships with fathers.     

Assessing more than you teach: the difficult case of transfer

We conducted two case studies to evaluate the effectiveness of individualized remedial reading instruction linked to direct measures of student learning and transfer. The participants were two first grade children at serious risk of reading failure. The instruction targeted decoding of one syllable short vowel words and first emphasized onset-rimes and then phoneme manipulation. Forty words organized into 10 rime patterns were targeted for instruction. Probes consisting of all the instructional words were administered before each instructional session to monitor student progress. We also administered transfer probes to determine if the children could apply their knowledge more broadly. Instruction with onset-rime units yielded excellent maintenance and near transfer (novel words containing instructed rimes) but not far transfer (novel words derived from uninstructed rimes). The instructional change to phoneme manipulation yielded better far transfer for one of the two children. We consider the importance of administering measures that assess more than what is taught to get an accurate portrait of children’s responsiveness to instruction.     

Touching the screen: issues related to the use of touchscreen technology in early childhood education

This paper reports on a research project that investigated the use of touchscreens by children in early childhood and junior primary settings by introducing touchscreens in five classrooms in Melbourne. Several methods to obtain information about how children interacted with the touchscreens were used including observation, journals and field notes, and interviews. The research identified five key themes, relating to developmental issues, input device preference, technical issues, individual differences in children's use of the touchscreen and issues of collaboration.