Annenberg Faculty Research

The Annenberg School stands at the forefront of basic and applied empirical research on the institutions, processes, nature, and consequences of communication. This research is based on theories, methods, and knowledge emerging from our own discipline as well those adapted from cognate disciplines in the humanities, social sciences and sciences. Many Annenberg faculty members are jointly appointed or hold secondary faculty positions in other schools and departments at Penn. Annenberg faculty and students regularly collaborate with each other and with faculty, researchers, and students from Penn’s other distinguished schools and centers. 

The result of this inter- and intra-disciplinary research network is a faculty and student body with the theoretical, methodological and substantive breadth, depth, and agility to produce cutting-edge research on the most pressing communication-centered issues of the twenty-first century.

Annenberg School for Communication

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  • Publication
  • Publication
    Media Failures in the Age of Trump
    (2016-01-01) Pickard, Victor
  • Publication
    Time-Evolving Dynamics in Brain Networks Forecast Responses to Health Messaging
    (2018-05-01) Cooper, Nicole; Garcia, Javier O; Tompson, Steven; O'Donnell, Matthew B; Falk, Emily B; Vettel, Jean M
    Neuroimaging measures have been used to forecast complex behaviors, including how individuals change decisions about their health in response to persuasive communications, but have rarely incorporated metrics of brain network dynamics. How do functional dynamics within and between brain networks relate to the processes of persuasion and behavior change? To address this question, we scanned forty-five adult smokers using functional magnetic resonance imaging while they viewed antismoking images. Participants reported their smoking behavior and intentions to quit smoking before the scan and one month later. We focused on regions within four atlas-defined networks and examined whether they formed consistent network communities during this task (measured as allegiance). Smokers who showed reduced allegiance among regions within the default mode and frontoparietal networks also demonstrated larger increases in their intentions to quit smoking one month later. We further examined dynamics of the VMPFC, as activation in this region has been frequently related to behavior change. The degree to which VMPFC changed its community assignment over time (measured as flexibility) was positively associated with smoking reduction. These data highlight the value in considering brain network dynamics for understanding message effectiveness and social processes more broadly.
  • Publication
    Global Brain Dynamics during Social Exclusion Predict Subsequent Behavioral Conformity
    (2018-02-01) Wasylyshyn, Nick; Falk, Brett H; Garcia, Javier O; Cascio, Christopher N; O'Donnell, Matthew B; Bingham, C. R; Simons-Morton, Bruce G; Vettel, Jean M; Falk, Emily B
    Individuals react differently to social experiences; for example, people who are more sensitive to negative social experiences, such as being excluded, may be more likely to adapt their behavior to fit in with others. We examined whether functional brain connectivity during social exclusion in the fMRI scanner can be used to predict subsequent conformity to peer norms. Adolescent males (n = 57) completed a two-part study on teen driving risk: a social exclusion task (Cyberball) during an fMRI session and a subsequent driving simulator session in which they drove alone and in the presence of a peer who expressed risk-averse or risk-accepting driving norms. We computed the difference in functional connectivity between social exclusion and social inclusion from each node in the brain to nodes in two brain networks, one previously associated with mentalizing (medial prefrontal cortex, temporoparietal junction, precuneus, temporal poles) and another with social pain (dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, anterior insula). Using predictive modeling, this measure of global connectivity during exclusion predicted the extent of conformity to peer pressure during driving in the subsequent experimental session. These findings extend our understanding of how global neural dynamics guide social behavior, revealing functional network activity that captures individual differences.
  • Publication
    The Strange Life and Death of the Fairness Doctrine: Tracing the Decline of Positive Freedoms in American Policy Discourse
    (2018-01-01) Pickard, Victor
    The Fairness Doctrine, one of the most famous and controversial media policies ever enacted, suffered a final deathblow in August 2011 when the Federal Communications Commission permanently struck it from the books. However, the Doctrine continues to be invoked by proponents and detractors alike. Using mixed methods, this study historically contextualizes the Fairness Doctrine while drawing attention to how it figures within contemporary regulatory debates. By tracing over time the shifting ideologies and discourses surrounding the Fairness Doctrine, we can see how political conflict shapes the normative foundations of core media policies, especially those involving positive freedoms.
  • Publication
    The Perils of Randomization Checks in the Analysis of Experiments
    (2012-01-01) Mutz, Diana; Pemantle, Robin
    In the analysis of experimental data, randomization checks, also known as balance tests, are used to indicate whether a randomization has produced balance on various characteristics across experimental conditions. Randomization checks are popular in many fields although their merits have yet to be established. The grounds on which balance tests are generally justified include either 1) the credibility of experimental findings, and/or 2) the efficiency of the statistical model. We show that balance tests cannot improve either credibility or efficiency. The most common “remedy” resulting from a failed balance test is the inclusion as a covariate of a variable failing the test; this practice cannot improve the choice of statistical model. Other commonly suggested responses to failed balance tests such as post-stratification or re-randomization also fail to improve on methods that do not require balance tests. We advocate resisting reviewer requests for randomization checks in all but some narrowly defined circumstances
  • Publication
    The Enabling Environment for Free and Independent Media: Contribution to Transparent and Accountable Governance
    (2002-01-01) Price, Monroe
    Throughout the world, there is a vast remapping of media laws and policies. This important moment for building more democratic media is attributable to rapid-fire geo-political changes. These include a growing zest for information, the general move towards democratization, numerous pressures from the international community, and the inexorable impact of new media technologies. Whatever the mix in any specific state, media law and policy is increasingly a subject of intense debate. Shaping an effective democratic society requires many steps. The formation of media law and media institutions is one of the most important. Too often, this process of building media that advances democracy is undertaken without a sufficient understanding of the many factors involved. This study is designed to improve such understanding, provide guidance for those who participate in the process of constructing such media, and indicate areas for further study. Laws are frequently looked at in isolation and as interchangeable parts that are separately advocated for the creation of effective and democracy-promoting media. They are also often analyzed and discussed with attention paid merely to their wording. However, each society has a cluster of activities, interactions of laws, and settings in which they exist that makes those laws more or less effective. Different states, at different stages of development, require different strategies for thinking about the role of media and, as a result, for thinking about the design and structure of the environment in which they operate.
  • Publication
    Resuscitating a Collaboration With Melville Nimmer: Moral Rights and Beyond
    (1998) Price, Monroe
    There are ways in which law is a set of illusions, and legal scholarship is about things which are said to happen, rather than really occur; where law is the expression of hope and passion rather than the embodiment of practical relationships. I have long thought that the area of intellectual property called "moral rights" or droit moral had these qualities of elegant fiction. Moral rights, in this special sense of art and literature, have to do with the personal and continuing involvement of the author or painter in a work of art, even after property owner shifts. Moral rights have to do, in their most dramatic manifestations, with physical changes in works of art - violence, deprecations, even the dissipation in integrity that inevitably comes with the passage of time. Moral rights are or can be violated when an artist's name is associated with a work that is not truly his or hers or when the work is represented as being the creation of another. Closely related are the issues that arise when a work is scarred or defaced, when it is reshaped or even placed in a hostile and unfriendly environment.
  • Publication
    An Ethnographic Filmflam: Giving Gifts, Doing Research, and Videotaping the Native Subject/Object
    (2004-03-01) Jackson, John L.
    Using the discussion of self-reflexivity as an organizing principle, this article examines how mobilizing digital video technology during fieldwork opens up empirical and theoretical space for reconceptualizing the relationship between anthropologists and informants. Placing the field of visual anthropology into critical conversation with long-standing theoretical arguments about the objectivist limitations of native anthropologists, I argue that the slipperiness of nativity as an anthropological designation helps to provide analytical tools for examining filmmaking as a kind of gift-giving process between native ethnographic filmmakers and the subjects of their films. This article highlights some of the ways in which my own filmic and videographic exploits in Harlem, New York, mark integral connections between seeing and being the proverbial other, probing social exchanges predicated on the usefulness of low-budget digital technology as a means of fostering politically and epistemologically valuable ethnographic collaborations.
  • Publication
    A Functional Near Infrared Spectroscopy (fNIRS) Replication of the Sunscreen Persuasion Paradigm
    (2018-05-01) Burns, Shannon M; Barnes, Lianne N; Katzman, Perri L; Ames, Daniel L; Falk, Emily B; Lieberman, Matthew D
    Activity in medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC) during persuasive messages predicts future message-consistent behavior change, but there are significant limitations to the types of persuasion processes that can be invoked inside an MRI scanner. For instance, real world persuasion often involves multiple people in conversation. Functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) allows us to move out of the scanner and into more ecologically valid contexts. As a first step, the current study used fNIRS to replicate an existing fMRI persuasion paradigm (i.e. the sunscreen paradigm) to determine if mPFC shows similar predictive value with this technology. Consistent with prior fMRI work, activity in mPFC was significantly associated with message-consistent behavior change, above and beyond self-reported intentions. There was also a difference in this association between previous users and non-users of sunscreen. Activity differences based on messages characteristics were not observed. Finally, activity in a region of right dorsolateral PFC (dlPFC), which has been observed with counterarguing against persuasive messages, correlated negatively with future behavior. The current results suggest it is reasonable to use fNIRS to examine persuasion paradigms that go beyond what is possible in the MRI scanner environment.