JungHwan Yang

How Trump Drove Coverage to the Nomination: Hybrid Media Campaigning

Writing in summer 2016 about Donald Trump and political communication is a fraught task. One is tempted to proclaim something dramatic: the end of an era, the beginning of one, or some kind of apot...

Candidate Networks, Citizen Clusters, and Political Expression Strategic Hashtag Use in the 2010 Midterms

Twitter provides a direct method for political actors to connect with citizens, and for those citizens to organize into online clusters through their use of hashtags (i.e., a word or phrase marked with # to identify an idea or topic and facilitate a search for it). We examine the political alignments and networking of Twitter users, analyzing 9 million tweets produced by more than 23,000 randomly selected followers of candidates for the U.S. House and Senate and governorships in 2010. We find that Twitter users in that election cycle did not align in a simple Right-Left division; rather, five unique clusters emerged within Twitter networks, three of them representing different conservative groupings. Going beyond discourses of fragmentation and polarization, certain clusters engaged in strategic expression such as “retweeting” (i.e., sharing someone else’s tweet with one’s followers) and “hashjacking” (i.e., co-opting the hashtags preferred by political adversaries). We find the Twitter alignments in the political Right were more nuanced than those on the political Left and discuss implications of this behavior in relation to the rise of the Tea Party during the 2010 elections.

Predictors of the change in the expression of emotional support within an online breast cancer support group: A longitudinal study

OBJECTIVES To explore how the expression of emotional support in an online breast cancer support group changes over time, and what factors predict this pattern of change. METHODS We conducted growth curve modeling with data collected from 192 participants in an online breast cancer support group within the Comprehensive Health Enhancement Support System (CHESS) during a 24-week intervention period. RESULTS Individual expression of emotional support tends to increase over time for the first 12 weeks of the intervention, but then decrease slightly with time after that. In addition, we found that age, living situation, comfort level with computer and the Internet, coping strategies were important factors in predicting the changing pattern of expressing emotional support. CONCLUSIONS Expressing emotional support changed in a quadratic trajectory, with a range of factors predicting the changing pattern of expression. PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS These results can provide important information for e-health researchers and physicians in determining the benefits individuals can gain from participation in should CMSS groups as the purpose of cancer treatment.

Dual Screening During Presidential Debates: Political Nonverbals and the Volume and Valence of Online Expression

The impact of presidential debates on candidate evaluations remains an open topic. Research has long sought to identify the factors that matter most in citizens’ responses to debate content, including what candidates say, how they say it, and the manner in which they appear. This study uses detailed codings of the first and third 2012 presidential debates to evaluate the impact of candidates’ verbal and nonverbal behaviors on viewers’ “second screen” response—their use of computers, tablets, and mobile devices to express their reactions to the viewing experience. To examine the relationship between candidates’ on-screen behaviors and the social media response, we conduct generalized least squares regression (Prais–Winstein estimation) relating two data sources: (a) a shot-by-shot content analysis coded for rhetorical/functional, tonal, and visual elements of both candidates’ behavior during the debates, and (b) corresponding real-time measures of the volume and valence of online expression about the candidates on Twitter. We find that the nonverbal communication behaviors of candidates—their facial expressions, physical gestures, and blink rate—are consistent, robust, and significant predictors of the volume and valence of public expression during debates, rivaling the power of memes generated by candidates and contributing more than rhetorical strategies and speech tone.

The Effects of Expressing Religious Support Online for Breast Cancer Patients

ABSTRACT The growth of online support groups has led to an expression effects paradigm within the health communication literature. Although religious support expression is characterized as a typical subdimension of emotional support, we argue that in the context of a life-threatening illness, the inclusion of a religious component creates a unique communication process. Using data from an online group for women with breast cancer, we test a theoretical expression effects model. Results demonstrate that for breast cancer patients, religious support expression has distinct effects from general emotional support messages, which highlights the need to further theorize expression effects along these lines.