Who’s Following Twitter? Coverage of the Microblogging Phenomenon by U.S. Cable News Networks

Through data captured in a digital content analysis (DCA) lab, we examine coverage of Twitter across three 24-hour U.S. cable news channels: CNN, Fox News Channel, and MSNBC. This investigation tracked Twitter coverage from its initial stage, followed by its rise to a massively used tool and its subsequent diffusion into society, evident through its plateauing coverage. News stories covering Twitter, as it penetrated into society, were more likely to use benefit/gain frames when discussing the technology, highlighting its positive social, communicative, political, and participatory impact. Benefit frames were also likely to associate Twitter with journalism. Patterns emerging through the indicator graphs plotted by the DCA lab showed that the most intense coverage occurred during crisis situations, as Twitter coverage reached saturation, followed by increased personal daily usage of Twitter

Enjoyment and appreciation as motivators for coping: Exploring the therapeutic effects of media messages on perceived threat.

This study explores how experience-based media messages featuring victims, survivors, and outperformers provide therapeutic benefits through the enjoyment and appreciation of the messages. Using the economic crisis as a context, our findings indicate that whereas distressed individuals were more likely to appreciate threat-related stories featuring victims and survivors over outperformers, nondistressed individuals were more likely to enjoy such stories featuring outperformers over victims and survivors. Appreciation and enjoyment of these threat-related stories predicted effective coping outcomes: positive reappraisal of the economic situation that also led to increased perceived control over the threat through positive affect. Health implications for enjoyment and appreciation of experience-based stories as motivators for coping outcomes are also discussed. © 2016 Jinhee Kim & Mina Tsay-Vogel.11Nssciscopu

Multidisciplinary approaches to research on bullying in adolescence

Bullying is a significant public health problem in the United States that affects youth functioning in multiple domains. Much of the research on bullying to date has focused on children, however, leaving gaps in the literature with respect to understanding bullying among adolescents. In particular, less is known about how adolescents conceptualize bullying, what predicts and is associated with bullying involvement among adolescents, and how prevention programs might address the unique needs of middle and high school students. This special issue proposes that a multidisciplinary perspective might be particularly useful in better understanding bullying among adolescents and determining how to design more effective interventions and prevention programs for this age-group. The current article introduces the special issue by briefly discussing what is known about bullying in adolescence and considering three disciplines (computer science, big data, and virtual communities; media studies; anthropology) that are particularly well situated to move the field forward. Next, this article reviews teen pregnancy prevention efforts, as an example of another adolescent public health concern that has been addressed successfully using a multidisciplinary approach. The article concludes with an overview of the three manuscripts that are part of the special issue