Social comparisons with news personae: Selective exposure to news portrayals of same-sex and same-age characters

Communication Research

Volumn 33, Issue 4, 2006, Pages 262-284

  Knobloch Westerwick, Silvia ^a   Hastall, Matthias R ^b  

^a OHIO STATE UNIVERSITY   (United States)

^b UNIVERSITY OF ERFURT   (Germany)

Author keywords

Age; Gender; Selective exposure; Self esteem; Social comparison

Indexed keywords

EID: 33745615650     PISSN: 00936502     EISSN: 15523810     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/0093650206289152     Document Type: Article

References (65)

1. Alagna, S. W. (1982). Sex role identity, peer evaluation of competition, and the responses of men and women in a competitive situation. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 43 (3). 546-554.
2. Armstrong, C. L. (2004). The influence of reporter gender on source selection in newspaper stories. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 81 (1). 139-154.
3. Bandura, A. (2001). Social cognitive theory of mass communication. Media Psychology, 3 (3). 265-299.
4. Baumeister, R. F., Campbell, J. D., Krueger, J. I., & Vohs, K. D. (2003). Does high self-esteem cause better performance, interpersonal success, happiness or healthier lifestyles? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 4 (1). 1-44.
5. Bem, S. L. (1981). Bem sex-role inventory: Professional manual. Palo Alto, CA: Consulting Psychologists Press.
6. Bennett, W. L. (1988). News: The politics of illusion. New York: Longman.
7. Brickman, P., & Bulman, R. J. (1977). Pleasure and pain in social comparison. In J. M. Suls & R. L. Miller (Eds.), Social comparison processes: Theoretical and empirical perspectives (pp. 125-148). Washington, DC: Hemisphere.
8. Cross, S. E., & Madson, L. (1997). Models of the self: Self-construal theory and gender. Psychological Bulletin, 122 (1). 5-37.
9. Esser, F. (1999). "Tabloidization" of news. A comparative analysis of Anglo-American and German press journalism. European Journal of Communication, 14 (3). 291-324.
10. Ferring, D., & Filipp, S.-H. (1996). Messung des Selbstwertgefü hls: Befunde zu Reliabilität, Validität und Stabilität der Rosenberg-Skala [Measuring self-esteem: Findings about the reliability, validity, and stability of the Rosenberg scale.] Diagnostica, 42 (3). 284-292.
11. Festinger, L. (1954). A theory of social comparison processes. Human Relations, 7 (2). 117-140.
12. Gans, H. (1979). Deciding what's news. New York: Pantheon.
13. Gardner, W. L., Gabriel, S., & Hochschild, L. (2002). When you and I are "we," you are not threatening: The role of self-expansion in social comparison. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82 (2). 239-251.
14. Gibbons, F. X., & Boney McCoy, S. (1991). Self-esteem, similarity, and reactions to active versus passive downward comparison. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 60 (3). 414-424.
15. Giles, D. C. (2002). Parasocial interaction: A review of the literature and a model for future research. Media Psychology, 4 (3). 279-305.
16. Gilligan, C. (1982). In a different voice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
17. Graber, D. A. (1990). Seeing is remembering: How visuals contribute to learning from television news. Journal of Communication, 40 (3). 134-155.
18. Harwood, J. (1997). Viewing age: Lifespan identity and television viewing choices. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 41 (2). 203-213.
19. Harwood, J. (1999). Age identification, social identity gratifications, and television viewing. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 43 (1). 123-136.
20. Hoffner, C. (1996). Children's wishful identification and parasocial interaction with favorite television characters. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 40 (3). 389-402.
21. Horton, D., & Strauss, A. (1957). Interaction in audience- participation shows. American Journal of Sociology, 62 (6). 579-587.
22. Horton, D., & Wohl, R. R. (1956). Mass communication and para-social interaction: Observation on intimacy at a distance. Psychiatry, 19 (3). 215-229.
23. Hutson-Comeaux, S. L., & Kelly, J. R. (2002). Gender stereotypes of emotional reactions: How we judge an emotion as valid. Sex Roles, 47 (1/2). 1-10.
24. Iyengar, S. (1991). Is anyone responsible? How television frames political issues. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
25. Knobloch, S., Callison, C., Chen, L., Fritzsche, A., & Zillmann, D. (2005). Children's sex-stereotyped self-socialization through selective exposure to entertainment fare. Journal of Communication, 55 (1). 122-138.
26. Knobloch, S., Weisbach, K., & Zillmann, D. (2004). Love lamentation in pop songs: Music for unhappy lovers? Zeitschrift für Medienpsychologie, 16 (2). 116-124.
27. Knobloch, S., & Zillmann, D. (2003). Appeal of love themes in popular music. Psychological Reports, 93 (3). 653-658.
28. Krüger, U. M. (1996). Boulevardisierung der Information im Privatfernsehen [Tabloidization of information in commercial television]. Media Perspektiven, 7 362-374.
29. Leary, M. R., Tambor, E. S., Terdal, S. K., & Downs, D. L. (1995). Self-esteem as interpersonal monitor: The sociometer hypothesis. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 68 (3). 518-530.
30. Liebert, R. M., & Sprafkin, J. (1988). The early window: Effects of television on children and youth. New York: Pergamon.
31. Lyubomirsky, S., & Ross, L. (1997). Hedonic consequences of social comparison: A contrast of happy and unhappy people. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 73 (6). 1141-1157.
32. Mares, M.-L., & Cantor, J. (1992). Elderly viewers' responses to televised portrayals of old age. Communication Research, 19 (4). 459-478.
33. Miller, M., & Reeves, B. (1976). Dramatic TV content and children's sex-role stereotypes. Journal of Broadcasting, 20 (1). 35-50.
34. Neuman, W. R., Just, M. R., & Crigler, A. N. (1992). Common knowledge. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
35. Nisbett, R. E., & Ross, L. (1980). Human inference: Strategies and shortcomings of social judgment. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall.
36. Oegema, D., & Kleinnijenhuis, J. (2000). Personalization in political television news: A 13 wave survey study to assess effects of text and footage. Communications, 25 (1). 43-60.
37. Patterson, T. E. (2000). Doing well and doing good: How soft news and critical journalism are shrinking in news audience and weakening democracy - and what news outlets can do about it. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University, John F. Kennedy School of Government.
38. Pew Research Center. (2004, June 8). News audiences increasingly politicized. Retrieved June 29, 2004, from http://people-press.org/reports/pdf/ 215.pdf
39. Price, V., & Czilli, E. J. (1996). Modeling patterns of news recognition and recall. Journal of Communication, 46 (2). 55-78.
40. Price, V., Tewksbury, D., & Powers, E. (1997). Switching trains of thought: The impact of news frames on readers' cognitive responses. Communication Research, 24 (5). 481-506.
41. Reeves, B., & Miller, M. M. (1978). A multidimensional measure of children's identification with television characters. Journal of Broadcasting, 22 (1). 71-86.
42. Rosenberg, M. (1965). Society and the adolescent self-image. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
43. Rucinski, D. (1992). Personalized bias in news. Communication Research, 19 (1). 91-109.
44. Schudson, M. (1978). Discovering the news. New York: Basic Books.
45. Signorielli, N. (2001). Television's gender role images and contribution to stereotyping: Past, present, future. In D. G. Singer & J. L. Singer (Eds.), Handbook of children and the media (pp. 341-358). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
46. Sparks, C., & Tulloch, J. (Eds.). (2000). Tabloid tales: Global debates over media standards. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.
47. Suls, J., Gaes, G., & Gastorf, J. W. (1979). Evaluating a sex-related ability: Comparison with same-, opposite-, and combined-sex norms. Journal of Research in Personality, 13 (3). 294-304.
48. Suls, J., Lemos, K., & Stewart, H. L. (2002). Self-esteem, construal, and comparisons with the self, friends, and peers. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 82 (2). 252-261.
49. Suls, J., & Wills, T. A. (Eds.). (1991). Social comparison. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
50. Tajfel, H. (1978). Social categorizations, social identity, and social comparison. In H. Tajfel (Ed.), Differentiation between social groups: Studies in the social psychology of intergroup relations (pp. 61-76). London: Academic Press.
51. Trepte, S. (2004). Soziale Identität und Medienwahl [Social identity and media choice]. Medien und Kommunikationswissenschaft, 52 (2). 230-249.
52. Tuggle, C. A. (1997). Differences in televised sports reporting of men's and women's athletics: ESPN SportsCenter and CNN Sports Tonight. Journal of Broadcasting & Electronic Media, 41 (1). 14-24.
53. Vohs, K. D., & Heatherton, T. F. (2004). Ego threats elicits different social comparison processes among high and low self-esteem people: Implications for interpersonal perceptions. Social Cognition, 22 (1). 168-191.
54. Vorderer, P. (1996). Picard, Brinkmann, Derrick & Co. als Freunde der Zuschauer [Picard, Brinkmann, Derrick & Co. as the viewer's friends]. In P. Vorderer (Ed.), Fernsehen als beziehungskiste. Parasoziale interaktionen und beziehungen mit medienfigure (pp. 151-169). Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag.
55. Vorderer, P., & Knobloch, S. (1996). Parasoziale Beziehungen zu Serienfiguren: Ergänzung oder Ersatz? [Parasocial relationships to TV series characters: Supplementing or functional alternative?]. Medienpsychologie, 8 (3). 202-216.
56. Wells, A. (2001). Nationality, race, and gender on the American pop charts: What happened in the '90ies? Popular Music & Society, 25 (1/2). 221-231.
57. Wills, T. A. (1981). Downward comparison principles in social psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 90 (2). 245-271.
58. Wills, T. A. (1991). Similarity and self-esteem in downward comparison. In J. Suls & T. A. Wills (Eds.), Social comparison (pp. 51-78). Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.
59. Wood, J. V., Giordano-Beech, M., Taylor, K. L., Michela, J. L., & Gaus, V. (1994). Strategies of social comparison among people with low self-esteem: Self-protection and self-enhancement. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 67 (4). 713-731.
60. Wood, J. V., Michela, J. L., & Giordano, C. (2000). Downward comparison in everyday life: Reconciling self-enhancement models with the mood-cognition priming model. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 79 (4). 563-579.
61. Zanna, M. P., Goethals, G. P., & Hills, J. F. (1975). Evaluating a sex-related ability: Social comparison with similar others and standard setters. Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 11 (1). 86-93.
62. Zillmann, D. (1994). Mechanisms of emotional involvement with drama. Poetics, 23 (1/2). 33-51.
63. Zillmann, D. (1999). Exemplification theory: Judging the whole by some of its parts. Media Psychology, 1 (1). 69-94.
64. Zillmann, D., & Knobloch, S. (2001). Emotional reactions to narratives about the fortunes of personae in the news theater. Poetics, 29 (3). 189-206.
65. Zoch, L. M., & VanSlyke Turk, J. (1998). Women making news: Gender as a variable in source selection and use. Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 75 (4). 762-775.