"Heimatliebe statt Marokkaner-Diebe"

Ziel der vorliegenden Studie war es, die Wirkung konservativer politischer Werbung auf die explizite und implizite Stereotypisierung von Menschen mit ausländischer Herkunft, mit dem Schwerpunkt auf Marokkaner/innen, zu analysieren. Zu diesem Zweck wurde, stellvertretend für ähnliche Plakatkampagnen aus dem deutschsprachigen Raum, ein im Frühjahr 2012 affichiertes Plakat der Tiroler FPÖ herangezogen. Dieses Plakat titelte den Spruch „Heimatliebe statt Marokkaner-Diebe“. Empirische Erkenntnisse aus der Stereotypen- und Medienwirkungsforschung sowie das APE-Modell nach Gawronski und Bodenhausen (2006) lieferten die theoretische Erklärungsgrundlage zur Herleitung der Hypothesen. Die Unterscheidung in implizite und explizite Stereotypisierung ermöglichte die Analyse unterschiedlicher mentaler Verarbeitungsprozesse. Um den Kausalzusammenhang zwischen dem Plakat und der der Stereotypisierung nachzuweisen, wurde ein experimentelles Design gewählt. Zu Beginn wurde den Proband/innen in einer Primingphase das Plakat mehrfach präsentiert. Unmittelbar danach wurde die implizite Stereotypisierung in einem Implicit Association Test erhoben. Die anschließende schriftliche Befragung diente der Erfassung der expliziten Stereotypisierung. Dafür waren von den Proband/innen Schätzungen zu den tatverdächtigen Ausländer/innen und Marokkaner/innen in Österreich anzugeben. Die Ergebnisse der Auswertung konnten aufzeigen, dass der Großteil der Proband/innen sowohl auf der expliziten wie auch auf der impliziten Ebene Stereotype anwendete. Die Detailergebnisse liefern somit interessante Einblicke in bestehende Stereotype der österreichischen Bevölkerung. Allerdings konnte kein Bezug zum FPÖ-Plakat hergestellt werden. Dies führt zu dem Schluss, dass das untersuchte Plakat keinen unmittelbaren Effekt auf die Stereotypisierung hat. Mögliche langfristige Wirkungen politischer Plakate bleiben in der Untersuchung somit unbeantwortet.The main goal of the current study was to explore the explicit and implicit stereotyping effects towards foreigners and towards Moroccans caused by political billboards from conservative political parties. For this purpose a billboard published from the FPÖ in spring 2012 was chosen which stands for similar political campaigns in German speaking countries. On the billboard the rime “Heimatliebe statt Marokkaner-Diebe” was written, which means „Love of one’s country instead of Moroccan thieves”. Empirical findings from research on media effects and on stereotypes as well as the APE-Model from Gawronski und Bodenhausen (2006) provided the theoretical framework for the derivation of the hypotheses. The differentiation between implicit and explicit stereotypes permitted the analysis of two different mental processes. To prove the causality of the billboard between the stereotyping effects, an experimental design was chosen. At the beginning the subjects were exposed to a priming process, in which they saw the billboard several times. Immediately after the priming phase the subjects took part at an Implicit Association Test to assess the implicit stereotyping effect. The subsequent written questionnaire covered the explicit stereotyping effect. For this purpose the subjects had to estimate the percentage of foreign and Moroccan suspects in Austria. The outcome of the data analysis identified among the majority of subjects explicit as well as implicit stereotyping effects. The details of the analysis provide interesting insights to existing stereotypes among the Austrian population, but no correlations to the billboard were found. This result leads to the conclusion, that the reviewed billboard has no effect on explicit nor on implicit stereotyping processes. Possible long-term effects of political campaigns couldn’t be answered with the results of the current study

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe

Longitudinal Effects of Excessive Smartphone Use on Stress and Loneliness: The Moderating Role of Self-Disclosure

The present study investigates how excessive smartphone use predicts users' stress and loneliness while taking the moderating role of online self-disclosure into account. We conducted a two-wave panel survey with a quota sample of smartphone users (n = 461 at time 2 [T2]). We found no direct effects of excessive smartphone use on stress or loneliness. However, our results showed that online self-disclosure moderates the postulated relationships. That is, excessive smartphone use (time 1 [T1]) predicts increased stress (T2), for those smartphone users who do engage in little online self-disclosure. However, for those who communicate their feelings, anxieties, and problems online, excessive smartphone use (T1) can even reduce loneliness (T2) and relieve stress (T2).status: publishe

‘Age Matters’ a panel study investigating the influence of communicative and passive smartphone use on well-being

Communicative and passive online use​ have been shown to affect individuals’ well-being in opposite ways. While communicative use is often associated with beneficial outcomes, passive use may even harm individuals’ well-being. However, existing studies have paid insufficient attention to the influence of age on these associations. Additionally, little evidence is available regarding the impact of communicative and passive smartphone use on individuals’ well-being across the life-span. Drawing upon the theoretical approaches of Socioemotional Selectivity Theory, Social Convoy Model, and Social Compensation Hypothesis, we assumed that particularly communicative smartphone use may be beneficial for older adults’ well-being, helping them to maintain their personal relationships. Results of a two-wave panel survey (NT2 = 461) revealed a significant negative influence of passive smartphone use on well-being irrespective of age. In line with the Socioemotional Selectivity Theory and Social Compensation Hypothesis, communicative smartphone use, however, only had a positive influence on well-being for adults older than 63 years, but not for younger adults. Our findings contribute to a broader understanding of the consequences of different types of smartphone use on well-being across generations in the longitudinal context.status: Published onlin

How Social and Mass Media Relate to Youth’s Self-Sexualization: Taking a Cross-National Perspective on Rewarded Appearance Ideals

Although media exposure has been related to cognitive preoccupation with appearance, research rarely investigated adolescents' behavioral self-sexualization. To address this gap, the present study among 12- to 16-year-olds (N = 1527; 50.2% girls) in Austria, Belgium, Spain, and South-Korea (1) investigates whether different types of media use relate to self-sexualization, (2) explores the explanatory value of rewarded appearance ideals, and (3) considers culture and gender as moderating factors. Despite cultural variation, a general trend of increasing self-sexualization with social media use and magazine reading appeared across the countries. Moreover, women's magazine reading and rewards were related to self-sexualization among all the girls across the countries, which suggests that girls may be more vulnerable to the examined effects. Overall, this study provides a better understanding of the unique contribution of specific media genres to youth's self-sexualization and points at the importance of social media use in girls' and boys' engagement in sexualizing appearance behaviors across four countries.status: publishe

"Too much to handle”: Impact of mobile social networking sites on information overload, depressive symptoms, and well-being.

status: Published onlin