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Article

Queering the Study of U.S. Military Family Communication  

Erin Sahlstein Parcell and Danielle C. Romo

Military families in the United States reflect diverse family forms. They include not only “traditional” families but also single service members, women service members, dual-career couples, service member mothers, single-parent service members, service members of color, cohabitating military service members (i.e., nonmarried couples), LGB service members, and transgender service members. However, the research primarily reflects white, heterosexual, cisgender, different sexed, married couples who are able-bodied with biological children as well as postpositivist and interpretivist perspectives; trends that parallel interpersonal and family communication studies broadly speaking. Given calls for new approaches within these areas, and in particular military family communication research, scholars should consider “queering” the study of military family communication by including individuals who identify as queer but also varying the research theoretically. Studies that bring attention to different types of military families (e.g., LGBTQ+ military families) would make significant contributions to the scholarship and make these families as well as their unique experiences visible. Informed by calls for critical military studies and the critical interpersonal and family communication framework (CIFC), recommendations are offered for future queer military family communication inquiry. First, a brief history of queer families in the military as well as the current state of military family communication scholarship are presented. Next, the CIFC framework, discourse dependence, and relational dialectics theory are discussed as conceptual paths for engaging in critical military family communication studies.

Article

Religion, Culture, and Communication  

Stephen M. Croucher, Cheng Zeng, Diyako Rahmani, and Mélodine Sommier

Religion is an essential element of the human condition. Hundreds of studies have examined how religious beliefs mold an individual’s sociology and psychology. In particular, research has explored how an individual’s religion (religious beliefs, religious denomination, strength of religious devotion, etc.) is linked to their cultural beliefs and background. While some researchers have asserted that religion is an essential part of an individual’s culture, other researchers have focused more on how religion is a culture in itself. The key difference is how researchers conceptualize and operationalize both of these terms. Moreover, the influence of communication in how individuals and communities understand, conceptualize, and pass on religious and cultural beliefs and practices is integral to understanding exactly what religion and culture are. It is through exploring the relationships among religion, culture, and communication that we can best understand how they shape the world in which we live and have shaped the communication discipline itself. Furthermore, as we grapple with these relationships and terms, we can look to the future and realize that the study of religion, culture, and communication is vast and open to expansion. Researchers are beginning to explore the influence of mediation on religion and culture, how our globalized world affects the communication of religions and cultures, and how interreligious communication is misunderstood; and researchers are recognizing the need to extend studies into non-Christian religious cultures.

Article

Thought Speed and Health Communication  

Kaite Yang and Emily Pronin

Social psychological research on thinking has generally focused on the attitudes, emotions, motivations, and biases that affect thinking and consequent behavior. What has received less attention is the speed of thinking: how quickly thinking occurs and whether thoughts accelerate or slow down. Communication design and processing may take for granted that the structure and reception of messages occur at a certain speed. Recent findings from the psychological study of thought speed shed light on ways that this research may be applied to health communication. Fast and slow rates of thinking are correlated with distinct patterns of affective, cognitive, physiological, and behavioral events. Fast thinking is associated with positive mood, energy, approach motivation, arousal, creativity, and risk-taking. Slow thinking is associated with negative mood and depression, low energy, and cognitive impairment. Potential theories exist for why psychological and physiological experiences are associated with thought speed. Recent experimental research demonstrates that thought speed can be successfully manipulated to elicit psychological effects, and it can be manipulated independent of thought content. Researchers, healthcare practitioners, and communicators should be aware of the psychological correlates and consequences of thought speed and consider harnessing the effects of thought speed to augment communication. Thought acceleration and deceleration can be integrated into the design and processing of health communication.

Article

Diffusion of Innovations from the West and Their Influences on Medical Education in Japan  

Mariko Morishita and Miho Iwakuma

In the 19th century, Western medicine spread widely worldwide and ultimately diffused into Japan. It had a significant impact on previous Japanese medical practice and education; it is, effectively, the foundation of contemporary Japanese medicine. Although Western medicine seems universal, its elements and origins as it has spread to other countries show localized differences, depending on the context and time period. Cultural fusion theory proposes that the culture of a host and influence of a newcomer conflict, merge, or transform each other. It could shed light on how Japanese medicine and medical education have been influenced by and coevolved with Western medicine and culture. Cultural fusion is not assimilation or adaptation; it has numerous churning points where the traditional and the modern, the insider (indigenous) and the outsider (immigrant), mix and compete. In Japan, medicine has a long history, encountering medical practices from neighboring countries, such as China and Korea in ancient times, and Western countries in the Modern period. The most drastic changes happened in the 19th century with strong influence from Germany before World War II and in the 20th century from the impact of the United States after World War II. Recently, the pressure of globalization could be added as one influence. Since cultural fusion is ubiquitous in Japanese medical fields, examples showing how the host and newcomers interact and merge can be found among many aspects of Japanese medicine and medical education, such as curricula, languages, systems, learning styles, assessment methods, and educational materials. In addition, cultural fusion is not limited to influence from the West but extends to and from neighboring Asian countries. Examining cases and previous studies on cultural fusion in Japanese medicine and medical education could reveal how the typical notion that Japan pursued Westernization of its medicine and medical education concealed the traditions and the growth of the local education system. The people involved in medicine in the past and the present have struggled to integrate the new system with their previous ideals to improve their methods, which could be further researched.

Article

Nonverbal Interpersonal Communication  

Miles Patterson

Nonverbal communication is ever present in face-to-face interactions. In interpersonal interactions, individuals are simultaneously sending information with their appearance and nonverbal behavior and receiving comparable information from their partners. Typically, this sending and receiving of nonverbal communication happens automatically and outside of awareness. Consequently, nonverbal communication is a remarkably effective means of managing contact with others, signaling information about social goals, and providing feedback to partners. Although some patterns of nonverbal communication are biologically hardwired, culture, gender, and personality introduce important differences in the subtle give-and-take of nonverbal communication. Finally, because nonverbal communication typically occurs automatically and outside of awareness, people often have little insight into its critical role in interactions.

Article

Relationship Conflict and Communication  

Daniel J. Canary

Since the 1970s hundreds of scholars from several disciplines have devoted their energies to understanding interpersonal conflict communication. One cannot offer an inclusive essay on the topic, even if the space allowed is 10 times greater than given here. One can, however, select salient aspects of the topic—those that appear often and implicate relational welfare. Toward that end, there are four parts to approaching the topic. First, a rationale for examining interpersonal conflict communication is presented. Emphasis on interpersonal conflict communication is confined to only a handful of reasons. Second, conceptualizations of interpersonal conflict are briefly represented and analyzed according to two dimensions that can help demarcate what scholars tend to study under the aegis of “conflict.” Third, a general pedagogical model of important considerations or “events” is given; each of the various components are elaborated, and each indicating what one should consider when involved in conflict. Fourth, future directions of research regarding the topic are explored.

Article

Black Gay Men in Television Comedy  

Cameron Lynn Brown and Alfred L. Martin Jr.

Approaches to studying Black gay men within television typically center examinations of the textual features of particular representations. In general, scholars focus on Black gayness vis-à-vis historic stereotypes, often focusing on hegemonic femininity as an analytic framework for cataloguing stereotypes of Black gay characters. Across White-/multicultural-cast sitcoms, Black-cast sitcoms, and sketch comedy, one of the difficulties associated with engaging with television and its engagement with the intersections of Blackness and gayness is that communication scholars often engage with media texts rhetorically. In that rhetorical treatment, there is often an elision of not only the specificities of television form but also the contours of genre. Thus, when examining Black gayness in television, that examination will look different depending on whether Black gayness appears on a “prestige” drama on a premium cable network or streaming platform, a sitcom with a principally Black or White cast, or a sketch comedy series.

Article

Same-Sex Couple Relationship Maintenance  

Stephen M. Haas

Same-sex couple relationship maintenance involves the exchange of communication and relational behaviors to sustain these romantic relationships. In communication studies, same-sex couple relationship maintenance began in the late 1990s, and while it remains understudied, research in this area continues to grow and illuminate understanding of how communication plays a central role in the maintenance of same-sex couple relationships. Social exchange, along with minority stress, have been the predominant theoretical frameworks in studies of same-sex couple relationship maintenance. Overall, evidence suggests that relational maintenance behaviors (assurances, shared tasks, openness, positivity, conflict management, advice, and shared networks) are associated with positive relational functioning and quality in same-sex couple relationships. Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer+ (LGBTQ+)-specific relational behaviors, such as being “out” as a couple and seeking out LGBTQ+-supportive environments, also have been highlighted. Research also points to the positive impact of partner social support and same-sex marriage on same-sex couple commitment and satisfaction, and a negative relational impact from concealing LGBTQ+ identity and same-sex relationship status. Future research is needed to continue to illuminate the evolving impact of increasing social legitimacy (e.g., same-sex marriage) on same-sex couple relationship maintenance.

Article

Social-Ecological Approaches to Health and Risk Messaging  

Kirsty Williamson

Before health and risk messaging can have the best possible effect, there needs to be an understanding of what might influence health and associated risky behaviors. A wide range of elements needs to be considered, given the many possible influences on health habits and risky exposures. Since “ecology” is defined as the relationship between organisms and their environments, ecological models enable this consideration to be made. As a result ecological approaches have been widely used in health behavior, health planning, and health education. Ecological theory, with a communication focus, has also been developed, emerging specifically from the field of “information behavior.” Grounded in the work of Bronfenbrenner, on the experimental ecology of human development, the theory grew out of a study of older adults’ information and communication needs and uses, undertaken in the 1990s. The ecological model, as developed, enabled a wide range of personal and social influences on information seeking and communication to be explored with people aged 60 and older. Analysis of the impact of multilevel factors is facilitated by an ecological approach, increasing its value for the task of designing the content of health and risk messages. The “how” of designing health messaging is not addressed specifically by this approach. Following the study of older adults, the ecological model was broadened, modified, and applied to the study of the information and communication behavior of different community groups, involving a range of topics. The flexibility of the approach is a key strength. A study of information seeking, by women with breast cancer, indicated that several “ecological” elements, such as age, ethnicity, and stage of disease, played a part in the type of information sought and in preferences for how information was communicated. Health and risk avoidance implications emerged from a study of information seeking for online investment, providing another good example of the ways in which the model can be adapted. A range of ecological factors were shown to influence investing behavior, including level of risk taking. A study of people in the Fourth Age (the last stage of life) resulted in a further refined and extended model, as well as making a contribution to the already substantial body of accumulated gerontological knowledge.

Article

Big Data and Communication Research  

Ralph Schroeder

Communication research has recently had an influx of groundbreaking findings based on big data. Examples include not only analyses of Twitter, Wikipedia, and Facebook, but also of search engine and smartphone uses. These can be put together under the label “digital media.” This article reviews some of the main findings of this research, emphasizing how big data findings contribute to existing theories and findings in communication research, which have so far been lacking. To do this, an analytical framework will be developed concerning the sources of digital data and how they relate to the pertinent media. This framework shows how data sources support making statements about the relation between digital media and social change. It is also possible to distinguish between a number of subfields that big data studies contribute to, including political communication, social network analysis, and mobile communication. One of the major challenges is that most of this research does not fall into the two main traditions in the study of communication, mass and interpersonal communication. This is readily apparent for media like Twitter and Facebook, where messages are often distributed in groups rather than broadcast or shared between only two people. This challenge also applies, for example, to the use of search engines, where the technology can tailor results to particular users or groups (this has been labeled the “filter bubble” effect). The framework is used to locate and integrate big data findings in the landscape of communication research, and thus to provide a guide to this emerging area.

Article

Social Media for Healthcare Communication  

S. Anne Moorhead

Social media used for communication purposes within healthcare contexts is increasing and becoming more acceptable. The users of social media for healthcare communication include members of the general public, patients, health professionals, and health organizations. The uses of social media for healthcare communication are various and include providing health information on a range of conditions; providing answers to medical questions; facilitating dialogue between patients and between patients and health professionals; collecting data on patient experiences and opinions used for health intervention, health promotion, and health education; reducing stigma; and providing online consultations. With emerging advances over time, including new platforms and purposes, these uses will change and expand, increasing usability and thus providing more opportunities to use social media in connection to healthcare in the future. However, both patients and health professionals may require training to fully maximize the uses of using social media in healthcare. Social media has numerous benefits for healthcare communication, including increased interactions with others; more available, shared, and tailored information; increased accessibility and widening access; and increased peer/social/emotional support. While there may be further benefits of using social media in healthcare, there are many limitations of social media for healthcare communication as well. The main reported limitations include a lack of reliability; quality concerns; and lack of confidentiality and privacy. From the available evidence, it is clear that maintaining patient privacy as well as the security and integrity of information shared are concerns when using social media. As patients and members of the general public use social media widely, some may expect it in healthcare, thus it important for health professionals and organizations to manage expectations of social media in healthcare communication. This results in challenges ranging from encouraging staff to use social media to dealing with user problems and complaints. It is recommended that organizations embrace social media but have a specific purpose for each activity and platform while continually monitoring traffic. Regardless of the nature or size of the healthcare organization, it is time to adopt appropriate guidelines for the use of the social media in healthcare communication to address the challenges and the growing expectations of using social media, especially within healthcare contexts. The key message is that social media has the potential to supplement and complement but not replace other methods to improve communication and interaction among members of the general public, patients, health professionals, and healthcare organizations.

Article

Worry and Rumination as a Consideration When Designing Health and Risk Messages  

Tamara D. Afifi, Ariana Shahnazi, and Kathryn Harrison

Rumination is typically thought of as pessimistic, repetitive thinking or mulling that is deleterious for one’s health. Rumination, however, can take several forms and is not always harmful. In fact, it could actually be helpful in certain circumstances. It is common and often helpful when something stressful happens, like a health scare or problematic health diagnosis, for people to ponder or reflect on why it happened and brainstorm potential solutions to it. This is referred to as reflective rumination. Rumination affects people’s risk perceptions related to their personal and relational health and decision-making about their health. Research on negative rumination and health and positive rumination and health focuses on the impact of these patterns of thinking on health outcomes such as mental health, physical health, and relational health and as perceptions of health messages and risk likelihood.

Article

Queer Safe Spaces and Communication  

Lital Pascar, Yossi David, Gilly Hartal, and Brandon William Epstein

Historically, organizations and individuals have (un)consciously produced safe spaces out of various backgrounds and in myriad ways. Specifically, queer safe spaces represent a significant construct within queer discourses and practices that articulate the need for physical, psychological, rhetoric, virtual, and imagined safety. In this context, safety means being protected from heteronormative and patriarchal violence that shapes the everyday lives and subjectivities of queer and LGBT+ individuals in public and private spaces. Whether these are offline, online, physical, or educational settings, queer safe spaces are defined as relational and deliberative spaces in which unsafety cannot be completely undone. Queer safe spaces then provide refuge for activism, social and personal transformation, facilitation thereof for productive spaces of dialogue, and identity construction. Even though the term “queer safe space” is commonly used, it remains undertheorized and no comprehensive understanding of queer safe spaces, their social role, or the practices involved in producing them exists. This article therefore defines queer safe spaces by encompassing the use of a critical perspective to foreground their qualities and fallacies as well as their inherent dilemmas and contradictions.

Article

Refugee and Mediated Lives  

Kevin Smets, Giacomo Toffano, and Silvia Almenara-Niebla

The lives of refugees are highly mediated. Media and technologies affect the daily experiences and trajectories of refugees in numerous ways while on the move as well as while settling into new homelands. Mediation processes also inform broader societal and political meanings that are assigned to refugees, as the figure of “the refugee” is constantly reshaped through processes of representation. Although these processes are much older, the research on refugees and mediation has accelerated especially since 2015. The literature focuses on three key areas: (a) refugees’ media uses and (dis)connectivity; (b) the role of media technologies in refugees’ everyday lives; and (c) media representations and narratives. Across these three areas, several important critiques have been formulated. These include criticisms of essentialist understandings of “the refugee” as well as Eurocentric and technocentric tendencies in the literature. A response to these criticisms might lay in a more historicized, contextualized, and situated approach to the mediated lives of refugees.

Article

Social Psychological Approaches to Intergroup Communication  

Katharine H. Greenaway, Cindy Gallois, and S. Alexander Haslam

Communication and social psychology have much in common. Both fields seek to answer basic questions about human behavior: how do we persuade and influence others? How do we develop and maintain social connections? When and why do relationships break down? But despite overlap in the questions they ask, social psychology and communication have remained remarkably separate disciplines, with vastly different research philosophies, methods, and audiences. It is important to interrogate the theoretical threads connecting communication and social psychology in the arena of intergroup communication, in order to bring the lenses of both fields to this arena. In particular, the construct of identity is woven through communication and social psychology research, and connects both fields to intergroup relations and communication. Paradoxically, issues of identity—how it is created, shaped, and signaled by the social contexts we inhabit—are frequently overlooked in both fields; in the future, there should and will be much more emphasis on the impact of identity in intergroup communication.

Article

Uncertainty Management Theories  

Michael A. Hogg and Sucharita Belavadi

The subjective state of uncertainty can be understood as deriving from reduced predictability of and control over events and the world around us. There are different ways to conceptualize the nature of uncertainty, its antecedents and predictors, and the strategies that individuals use to manage & reduce uncertainty within communication science and social psychology. Prominent theories of uncertainty within communication—uncertainty reduction theory, anxiety/uncertainty management theory, and approaches to uncertainty management—focus on states of uncertainty and lowered predictability within the context of interactive communication with others. In these theories, communication with others plays a central role in the production, maintenance, and management of uncertainty. These three communication-based approaches also differ in the ways in which they conceptualize uncertainty and its management in communicative contexts. Uncertainty reduction theory treats uncertainty as an aversive state that individuals always aim to reduce. In contrast, although anxiety/uncertainty management theory and approaches to uncertainty management discuss uncertainty as an aversive state, they also provide for conditions under which uncertainty might be a desired state. Within social psychology, the construct of uncertainty has received different treatments. Some approaches have conceptualized the extent of uncertainty experienced and tolerated by individuals as an enduring individual difference or a personality attribute. Social psychologists have also conceptualized uncertainty as an aspect of a person’s identity and self-concept. For instance, uncertainty-identity theory explains uncertainty as a context-invoked aversive state associated with lowered perceived predictability of self and others—uncertainty about who one is, how one should behave, and how one will be treated by others. The theory argues that individuals are motivated to reduce such uncertainty by seeking group memberships, as groups provide a framework for self-definition that helps manage self-conceptual uncertainty.

Article

Cultural Studies and Communication  

Toby Miller

Communication and cultural studies share turbulent and contradictory histories, epistemologies, methods, and geographies, both on their own and as partners and rivals. This is in keeping with their status as interdisciplinary areas that emerged in the early to mid-20th century and crossed the humanities and the social sciences. Communication and cultural studies are linked and distinguished both by the topics they analyze and by their politics, countries, disciplines, theories, languages, and methods. Whereas the dominant forms of communication studies are dedicated to scholarly objectivity and disciplinary coherence, cultural studies is more akin to a tendency connected to concerns and identities on the margins of academia, and committed to methodological diversity. And whereas the critical strand of communication studies, notably political economy, examines such social forces of domination as the state and capital, cultural studies investigates the struggles undertaken by ordinary people to interpret dominant cultural forms in terms of their conditions of existence. The supposedly pessimistic orientation of political economy is frequently eschewed in favor of a faith in the resistive qualities of the oppressed and silenced. A similar perspective characterizes cultural studies’ rejection of effects studies for neglecting the politicized way that active audiences interpret media texts. In place of such concerns, the dominant strands of cultural studies tend to favor aesthetic and anthropological ways of analyzing societies to examine subjectivity and power and work with the understanding that popular culture represents and creates rituals and vice versa, through institutions and discourses that construct identities, which in turn form them.

Article

Discourses and Counter-Discourses on Race and Coloniality Toward a Journalism-Other in Latin America  

Jessica Retis and Alejandro Barranquero

In Latin America, the 21st century has become a period of opportunities to promote a journalism defined around the recognition of diversity, hybridity, and cultural autonomy in Latin America. After a 19th century characterized by wars of independence, and a 20th century defined by emancipatory struggles against military and oligarchic regimes, the theories and practices of alternative, intercultural, and indigenous communication of recent decades have laid solid foundations for articulating a number of “journalism others” made from and for Latin America and capable of challenging the dominant journalistic cultures and their positivist, objectivist, and liberal imprints. In addition to decolonizing imported and Eurocentric thinking, moving toward the articulation of Latin American alternative and intercultural journalisms involves incorporating critical and indigenous knowledge and its particular conception of communication as a process or system of life. Despite that Latin American journalistic cultures are still dominated by a White colonial stamp, there exists theoretical and practical bases from which to think about intercultural journalisms from Latin America understood as a locus of autonomous thought characterized by its complexity, hybridization and miscegenation.

Article

North Korean Migration, Communication, and Identity  

Jay Song

For a multitude of economic, social, and environmental factors, a large number of North Koreans explored various migratory routes into and outward from China. An increasing number of these migrants eventually choose to settle in South Korea. Consequently, this development has led to significant ramifications individually and across South Korean society with regard to identity transformation, coethnic dynamics, and contemporary conceptualizations of nationhood, which ultimately affect potential reunification scenarios between the Koreas. This article critically reviews how North Korean migrants have transformed their identities through various interactions and communication with the Korean-Chinese, South Koreans, and Korean-Americans during their journeys from North Korea through China and Southeast Asia to South Korea, as well as the South Korean and Western media portrayals of North Koreans. The study utilizes existing literature on the topic, official statistics of North Korean arrivals in South Korea, and public polls on unification as well as the author’s own interviews of approximately 500 North Korean migrants in China and South Korea since 1999. It argues that while North Koreans in South Korea have successfully transformed their legal identity from the socialist northern to the capitalist southern citizenship, their socioethnic identities are still in the making. Coethnic tensions among Koreans with different nationalities have formed a kind of hierarchical nationhood among them and placed them in a certain socioeconomic order. This hierarchy and othering among ethnic Koreans based on birthplace and residence has important policy implications for any future unification scenario. Younger South Koreans have ambivalent attitudes toward North Koreans, taking a pragmatic economic approach to reunification as peace, rather than an ethnocentric national unity and political union.

Article

Cyberculture and Globalization  

André Lemos

Globalization should be understood as a new economic, political, and cultural dynamic in what is now a global space. It is diagnosed based on a description of the different phases in its development, as an abstract, modern narrative reinforced by cyberculture, the information and communications technologies (ICTs) culture that emerged in the 1970s. Communications media have enabled the constraints and limits of space and time to be overcome, expanding human agency and connecting people and objects. Globalization is linked to the development of cyberculture precisely because this increases the number of different types of connections between people, products, and information all around the planet. It is constructed abstractly, as it does not pay the price of the connections and connectors that locate social relations. At the same time as it helps to create the fiction of “global globalization,” cyberculture reveals mediators that always connect objects, processes, people, and places, making a “localized globalization” visible. Rather than being merely deterritorializing, globalization produces connections and situations with the aid of connectors. Like every sociotechnical network, it is involved in the creation of new spatialities. The narrative of globalization ignores the connectors and overlooks the notion of territory, asserting the global nature of globalization when in fact it is the result of concrete mediations performed locally, produced by a specific and material network. It is important to politicize globalization. This requires “relocalization” of the global, that is, identifying specific, material situations. Having an appreciation of this dependence leads us to very concrete political attitudes. Attention is drawn to the need to give visibility to the mediators that anchor experiences, gainsaying the generic nature of globalization and allowing it to be politicized.