Communication Research

The invisible college has been shown to be an important part of the information environment in several scientific specialties, but humanists have been thought to work in comparative isolation. This study of 123 scholars of children's literature found an invisible college within a specialty in the humanities. Members were more highly connected than others in the field, more senior, had published more, and were more likely to have their written work listed as influential. More than 50% of all respondents indicated that at least 50% of the time they discussed their work in its early stages, discussed the specific primary sources about which they were planning to write, and found ideas for their scholarship arising out of informal communication.

The theory of attentional inertia holds that attentional engagement increases over the time course of a look at television and that this engagement rapidly dissipates when the look ends. The theory was tested in a study of 41 undergraduate students' viewing of 2 hours of videotaped dramatic television programs and associated commercials. The main results were that (a) inertial engagement sustains looks across boundaries between programs and commercials, (b) inertial engagement does not carry over from one look to the next, (c) inertial engagement was associated with greater recognition memory for TV content, and (d) as predicted by a model of attentional inertia, look length distributions are approximately lognormal and hazard functions are nonmonotonic with a peak at about 1 second.

Loneliness might be ameliorated by the gratifications offered by the media. However, evidence in support of this assumption is mixed. Relying on an attributional view of loneliness, this study tested the proposition that people who are chronically lonely derive fewer gratifications from the media than do situationally lonely and nonlonely people. Two studies were conducted to assess the nature of the relationship between experienced loneliness and media gratifications. Results generally support the prediction that chronically lonely persons rely less on media for escape than do others. Moreover, chronically lonely persons reported the least motivation for watching their favorite soap opera.

Debate about the appropriateness of using self-reported communication as a proxy for observable communication in studies of organizational communication networks has created a paradox for network researchers that diverges along classic lines of individualism and collectivism. The inability of either to resolve fundamental theoretical challenges of the other suggests need for an alternative approach. Working from a situationalist perspective, this laboratory study looked to two important characteristics of the collective context to explain divergences of self-reported from observed communication behavior. Members' perceived relationship to the group explained 59% of the variance in the average size of their commission errors, and the collective communication load on members explained 61% of the variance in their number of omission errors. A revised model of the relationship between the perceived network and observable communication is proposed. It includes social-cognitive processes that govern the perception of links and social activation processes that connect perceptions to concrete situations where messages are exchanged.