Communication Research

Noelle-Neumann's spiral of silence is tested with data from the 1948 Elmira election study. Results indicate that support for the theory and trends in the data are consistent with expectations for the spiral of silence as an additional explanation for the famous election misprediction. Statistical tests affirm Noelle-Neumann's suggestion that social isolation is associated with fear of isolation and provide partial support for the idea that social isolation interacts with fear of isolation in the spiral of silence effect.

Research on social perception and a reassessment of findings from third-person research suggest that an individual's tendency to third-person perception is constrained by his or her perceptual position. For some people (e.g., the less well educated), it is probably less easily possible to perceive others as more susceptible to media effects than themselves. These kinds of constraints were investigated using data on third-person perception of television viewing behaviors (which is analogous to third-person perception of media influences). The authors found that people indeed showed a weaker tendency to third-person perception if they were in a less favorable position to do so, given their own viewing behavior and their attitudes. The limits / possibilities perspective seems useful for integrating research findings and may enhance our understanding of individual differences in third-person perception.

Television political advertising has been criticized for focusing too much on candidates' image rather than on their issue positions. Yet, image advertising has been largely ignored by the press as a source for news stories. This study examined the effects of a proposed type of television adwatch story—one that critiqued political advertisements that focused on a candidate's image. Image adwatches produced less positive candidate evaluations than the control group, which saw no adwatches. This pattern did not hold for issue adwatches. Participants did not apply information from either the issue or image adwatch to ads that were different from those critiqued in the adwatches. Recall of the ad was lower for issue adwatches, but only when they critiqued a different ad. Participants did not penalize journalists for their image adwatch stories. Findings are discussed in an information processing perspective.

This study examines the validity of a norm-reinforcement approach as a complementary model to direct media effects on health behavior change. Focusing on news coverage effects on youth binge drinking between 1978 and 1996, it was hypothesized that the media may have contributed to the reduction in this behavior by increasing perceptions of social disapproval. The predictive power of this approach was then compared with that of other plausible models (namely, a direct effect model and a model proposing media effects that are mediated by policy actions). The findings from two separate tests (a time-series regression and the ideodynamic method) suggest that although a direct route of media effects on binge-drinking behavior produced evidence of null effects, there was evidence that the impact of news stories on this behavior was mediated by policy actions as well as by changes in the social acceptability of this behavior. Implications of this approach to the study of media effects on health behavior change are discussed.