Although many studies have been published detailing the effects of narratives on persuasion, no literature has been published on the impact of narratives on psychological reactance in the context of anti-pornography campaigns. This study expands on prior narrative research by measuring adults' aged 21-76 (N=187) level of psychological reactance to statistical, research-based, and narrative videos. The study also explored Intrinsic Religious Motivation and perceived threat and susceptibility as factors. No significant relationship between narratives and reduced psychological reactance was found, however, findings indicated that viewing anti-pornography narratives caused individuals to view the threat of pornography as being more severe while simultaneously considering themselves less susceptible to the threat. This suggests the presence of optimistic bias. The study's findings also suggested that having strong beliefs is connected to a having greater perceived threat and susceptibility to pornography addiction.

This thesis analyses the negative and positive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the religious practices of the pentecostal Hillsong church in Malmö, Sweden. To do so it draws on theoretical concepts of affordance, mediatization of religion, and media effects, in order to explore what emerged through digital ethnographic research that included church event observations, interviews, and qualitative surveys. It is argued that the digital form of communication among believers during the pandemic constrained religious practices in terms of service, congregational worship and connection with fellow worshippers. However, this kind of communication has also made it possible to maintain church fellowship in a creative and simultaneously safe and feasible way. The virtual space created through video streams, Zoom meetings and other online activity impacted the way people worship and engage with the preaching and the congregation as a whole. Thus the purpose of this study is to explore the influence of the COVID-19 pandemic requirement for online worship on religious practices in a Nordic location of the Hillsong church, examining ways in which online and offline religious practices were isolated from, integrated into and influenced by one another to accomplish individual and corporate needs and goals.

While the traditional agenda-setting theory assumes that a unified issue salience pattern (“the agenda”) will transfer from news media to the public, the emergence of the Internet has challenged this classic communication theory in three ways: by providing two versions of the public agenda (i.e., self-reported issue importance measured by a survey versus social media expressions), by affording two versions of the media agenda (i.e., presented on news websites versus on organizations’ Twitter accounts), and by enabling potential two-way agenda-setting effects. This dissertation aims to construct a multi-version two-way agenda-setting framework via (1) elaborating on the theoretical and practical reasons behind the proposed framework and (2) empirically testing the framework by combining survey and digital texts data around the 2020 US presidential election. The results show an imbalanced two-way agenda-setting relationship, with the traditional media-to-public direction still stronger than the reverse. While the two versions of the media agenda were similar to each other, what people thought was found to be different from what they tweeted. This dissertation also explored the moderating effects of issue-, media-, and individual-level characteristics on the direction and strength of the agenda-setting effects. The issue-wise comparison showed stronger effects in both directions among obtrusive issues, compared to non-obtrusive issues. Interestingly, traditional, non-digital-native media presented a slightly stronger two-way agenda-setting relationship between their news tweets and citizens' tweets compared to digital-native media. This difference, however, was not found in news websites. Individuals with specific characteristics, such as being females, being older, being white, as well as having lower income, lower opinion leadership, and lower social capital, were more likely to influence and be influenced by the media agendas compared to their counterparts. Also, while the well-educated population followed the agenda of news websites more closely, the group with a lower education level followed news tweets on more issues. Finally, the last chapter discusses theoretical, methodological, and practical implications.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

Research has unearthed an abundance of objectification and hypersexualization of female characters within video games. However, the recurring element of the damsel in distress trope is also harmful to the medium. This cliché of a helpless princess in need of a man to save her is a recurring element of The Legend of Zelda series. This experimental design tested the effects of a prototypical œsave the princess mission on players agreement to sexist statements on gender roles, objectification, and female dependency, and examined the factors of self-efficacy and gamer status as potential mediators. Participants played a modified version of a classic Legend of Zelda game, where the genders of the hero protagonist and damsel are manipulated. This 2 x 2 study included male and female heroes rescuing male and female victims in the four different cells. Immediately following the experiment, participants then took a post-test survey to gauge if there was any difference on their agreement to sexist statements. These results were also compared to their previous responses on their self-efficacy scores and their gamer status.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.