Volume 45, Issue 1

One of the psychological responses to audiovisual fictions that has been receiving more attention recently is appreciation, defined as a reflexive eudaimonic gratification obtained from a meaningful entertainment mode. Appreciation is the perception that the media experience has a profound meaning, has taught or revealed something. This study seeks to advance on the understanding of appreciation by youngsters. It translates and adapts the Oliver and Bartsch’s questionnaire for teenagers of three European countries. A total of 213 Italians, 55 Spaniards and 42 Germans watched a drama film and immediately afterwards answered the questionnaire. The results of confirmatory factor analysis suggest the existence of four first-order factors for each country. The multi-group analysis shows the questionnaire is not invariant across groups. Thus, the concept of appreciation in its current formulation is not universal. Instead, it seems to be dependent on the cultural aspects of the audience. This article discusses the implications of such results for the understanding of appreciation and of teenagers’ media responses. It also reports mean comparisons for the invariant parameters.

In the present study we investigated the role of channel characteristics with regard to gender role portrayals in television advertisements. Drawing on cultivation theory and social cognitive theory, we investigated six key variables in this line of research. We sampled a total of N = 1022 advertisements from four Austrian television channels: a public service channel, a commercial channel, and one commercial special interest channel for men and for women, respectively. Our results replicate well-known stereotypic gender role portrayals prevalent in television advertisements. The public service channel and the private channel did not differentiate from each other with regards to gender stereotyping. We found that a channel with a female target group aired advertisements containing the same or even amplified stereotypes compared to a male channel. The potential negative effects of stereotypic gender role portrayals in television advertisements are discussed.

Given the increased relevance of social networking sites (SNSs) for consumers around the globe, companies face the challenge of understanding motivations underlying consumers’ interactions with online brand-related content. Cross-cultural research on consumer motivations for online brand-related activities on SNSs, however, is limited. The present study explored, via in-depth interviews, reasons why Facebook users from individualistic (the Netherlands, the United States) and collectivistic (South Korea, Thailand) cultures engage with brand-related content. The findings provide in-depth insights, in particular, with regards to collectivistic consumers, to the varied interpretations of the motivations for COBRAs identified in previous literature. We also identified a new motivation specifically for collectivistic cultures: the desire to share an intention to purchase or try a product. Moreover, while collectivistic motivations were driven by the wish to express a sense of belonging to the social group, individualistic cultures appear to engage with brands mainly for obtaining advantages for themselves.

Muslim migrants are the counter-figures through whom the modern Western identity is shaped. In Islamophobic discourses, they are constructed as inherently sexist and homophobic. In this ideological context, queer migrants coming from Muslim countries occupy an intersectional social location between Islamophobia and homophobia. In this paper we analyze the cinematic representation of queer migrants living in Europe coming from Muslim backgrounds. The aim of the paper is to analyze whether the films reproduce or subvert the Western “gay narrative”. The corpus of analysis is made up of 19 films which were studied through a process of categorization of the relevant fragments in a matrix. The films are classified in three categories according to their approach. The first gathers those films that hold an assimilationist discourse, according to which queer migrants should embrace the Western “gay narrative” and abandon the values of the communities of origin. In the second category, the films propose a hybrid perspective in which characters merge elements from both the country of residence and the cultural background of origin in the exploration of their sexuality and gender. The films in the third category revolve around a metaphorical relationship between a queer migrant and a native person, promoting a reflection on the possibilities of transformative encounters that break the boundaries between supposedly opposed social groups.

This study examines the professionalization of political communication by focusing on changes to campaign posters for Bundestag elections over the course of five eras of German post-war history. We conducted a quantitative content analysis of both visual and textual elements of campaign posters (N = 1,857) in the period from 1949 to 2017 with regard to personalization, de-ideologization, and negative campaigning. The study revealed differences related to the five eras. Following the early conservative governments (1949–1969), high levels of personalization and ideologization first became defining features of election campaigns during the social-liberal era (1969–1982). After the Kohl era (1982–1998), these trends have occurred again since the Schröder era (1998–2005) and have been reinforced in the Merkel era (2005–2017). Furthermore, we found neither a clear upward nor a downward trend for negative campaigning. Overall, our study demonstrated that political parties adapt their communication strategies to the context of the respective election.