Franziska Marquart

A New Look at Campaign Advertising and Political Engagement Exploring the Effects of Opinion-Congruent and -Incongruent Political Advertisements

Exposure to cross-cutting versus like-minded political advertising is highly relevant in terms of deliberative democratic theory. However, few efforts have been made to shed light on the effects of such opinion-incongruent and -congruent political advertisements. By analyzing data from a representative panel survey, and hence identifying effects over time, we found that exposure to opinion-congruent advertising enhanced political participation. Opinion-congruent advertising also accelerated the timing of voting decisions when citizens were low in ideological strength. However, contrary to our expectations, exposure to opinion-incongruent political advertising had no effects on political participation and the timing of voting decisions. These findings suggest that opinion-congruent advertising is a strong mobilizer, whereas opinion-hostile advertising is a weak cross-pressure. Implications of these findings for the study of political advertising effects are discussed.

Positively Valenced, Calming Political Ads

We investigated whether political print ads were able to moderate the influence of automatic affective gut reactions (i.e., implicit attitudes) on overtly expressed evaluations (i.e., explicit attitudes) of foreigners. In accordance with the feeling-as-information theory (Schwarz, 2012, In Van Lange et al. (Eds.), Handbook of Theories of Social Psychology, Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage), we assumed that political ads containing positive, calming stimuli (e.g., nature pictures) signal a benign environment and thus should lead to less-effortful processing in subsequent situations. Due to the fact that the implicit–explicit correspondence is assumed to be higher under less-effortful processing, we hypothesized that these political print ads are able to increase the implicit–explicit correspondence. We tested this in an experiment in which participants (N = 164) were exposed to three positively valenced, calming ads of a European right-wing party (treatment group 1), or three negatively valenced, arousing ads of th...

Questionable Research Practices in Experimental Communication Research: A Systematic Analysis From 1980 to 2013

Questionable research practices (QRPs) pose a major threat to any scientific discipline. This article analyzes QRPs with a content analysis of more than three decades of published experimental research in four flagship communication journals: Journal of Communication, Communication Research, Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, and Media Psychology. Findings reveal indications of small and insufficiently justified sample sizes, a lack of reported effect sizes, an indiscriminate removal of cases and items, an increasing inflation of p-values directly below p < .05, and a rising share of verified (as opposed to falsified) hypotheses. Implications for authors, reviewers, and editors are discussed.

Children's attitudinal and behavioral reactions to product placements: investigating the role of placement frequency, placement integration, and parental mediation

The role of placement characteristics such as brand integration and placement frequency for brand outcomes on children has largely been ignored in extant research. We also lack insights about parental mediation as a potential moderator in this context. The present paper describes an experimental study in which children were exposed to different versions of a cartoon movie which included a moderately or frequently placed chips brand. The brand was either presented as a screen- or as a plot-placement. Childrens attitudinal and behavioral outcomes were matched with surveys completed by their parents who answered questions about their mediation strategies. Compared to screen-placements, moderately and frequently presented plot-placements lead to an increase in childrens product choice. Parents’ advertising mediation strategies were not able to prevent this behavioral outcome. Our findings offer insights into childrens susceptibility to product placement effects relevant to parents, educators, and policy regulators.

Corrupt politicians? Media priming effects on overtly expressed stereotypes toward politicians

Abstract The present study investigates whether or not reading about corrupt politicians influences peoples’ subsequent judgments toward political actors’ supposed corruptness. We expected this media stereotype priming effect to be dependent on pre-existing implicit stereotypes. It was hypothesized that only those participants would show a media priming effect who already have a strong automatic association between ‘politicians’ and ‘corrupt’ in memory prior to reading a further facilitative article (“politicians are corrupt”). Conversely, people who do not have a comparable biased cognitive association should not. Data from an experiment support this hypothesis: We found pre-existing implicit stereotypes to moderate the media priming effect on explicit stereotypes, but only when the newspaper article covered the “corrupt politician” media stereotype with sufficient salience. Furthermore, the experiment showed that antagonistic media primes (“politicians are honest”) did not produce a media priming effect at all. Antagonistic articles were simply not able to prime corruption-related memory traces.

Shaping children's healthy eating habits with food placements? Food placements of high and low nutritional value in cartoons, Children's BMI, food-related parental mediation strategies, and food choice

Research on media induced food choices of children has not sufficiently investigated whether food placements of snacks high in nutritional value can strengthen childrens healthy eating behavior. Furthermore, we lack knowledge about the moderating role of childrens individual characteristics such as parental food-related mediation or BMI. The current study combines data from an experiment involving children with a survey of their parents. We exposed children to a cartoon either containing no food placements, placements of mandarins (i.e., snack high in nutritional value), or placements of fruit gums (i.e., snack low in nutritional value). Afterwards, food consumption was measured by giving children the option to choose between fruit gums or mandarins. Children in both snack placement conditions showed stronger preference for the snack low in nutritional value (i.e., fruit gum) compared to the control group. Interestingly, neither restrictive nor active food-related mediation prevented the effects of the placements on childrens choice of snacks low in nutritional value. Compared to children with a low BMI, children with high BMI levels had a stronger disposition to choose the fruit gums if a snack high in nutritional value (i.e., mandarin) was presented. Thus, making snacks high in nutritional attractive for children through media presentation might need stronger persuasive cues.

The Selective Avoidance of Threat Appeals in Right-Wing Populist Political Ads: An Implicit Cognition Approach Using Eye-Tracking Methodology.

Right-wing populist parties increasingly use political poster advertisements depicting negative and threatening images of foreigners, especially framing Muslims as a threat to Western European countries and culture (e.g. Betz, 2013; Marquart, 2013). For instance, parties such as the SVP in Switzerland, the FPO in Austria, the Fremskrittspartiet in Norway, or the NPD in Germany apply political poster ads that openly attack minorities and immigrants. These poster ads often depict simple, strongly emotional content, such as praying or screaming Muslims, or women in Burkas.