Celebrating Faculty Excellence

Our faculty are dedicated to producing impactful research that provides valuable insights into advertising and public relations. This showcase exemplifies how our faculty work to provide new insights and perspectives into important topics that affect their field and beyond.

Research

When you look at the broad and impressive body of our faculty’s research, you will notice that it is research that matters. Our faculty are experts on everything from advertising policy to health to crisis to sustainability to corporate social responsibility. They use their platforms as scholars to serve both higher education and society, and the diverse body of work the faculty produces positions it as a leading academic home for students from a vast array of contexts and methods in which to learn.”

beth Foster

Professor and Director of the Tombras School of Advertising and Public Relations

Research

Please note that some articles, books, and other published works may require a subscription. Students and UT employees interested in reading a published piece can seek access through the UT Libraries website.

Exposure Effects or Confirmation Bias? Examining Reciprocal Dynamics of Misinformation, Misperceptions, and Attitudes Toward COVID-19 Vaccines

Assistant Professor Christina Najera

In this Health Communication journal article, Najera and co-authors conduct a longitudinal study that integrates exposure effects and confirmation bias under the theoretical framework of dynamic motivation activation (DMA) to examine the dynamic reciprocity of misinformation, misperceptions, and attitudes in the context of COVID-19 vaccination.

Results from a three- national survey showed that misinformation exposure, misperceptions, and attitudes toward COVID-19 vaccines reinforced themselves over time. Further, misperceptions reduced subsequent pro-vaccine attitudes, and pro-vaccine attitudes in turn decreased subsequent misperceptions. Longitudinal mediation analysis also indicated that attitudes reinforced themselves through misperceptions.

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Remembering the FCB Grid: Thinking, Feeling, and Involvement in the Age of Social Media

Professor Eric Haley, Assistant Professor Matthew Pittman

In this Journal of Advertising article, Haley and Pittman outline the Foote, Cone, and Belding (FCB)grid’s original propositions as a strategic tool and discuss some of ways it has been misinterpreted along the way.

The FCB grid was developed to help advertising practitioners think strategically and situationally about the way consumers make purchase decisions. It was a prominent theoretical perspective for scholars in the 1980s but has been neglected in recent years. The authors explicate its potential for practitioners and scholars in the contemporary media environment, propose our own grid of appropriate channels for each quadrant, and offer some guidance for future scholars to leverage this theory moving forward.

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Read Haley and Pittman’s article

Exemplifying Power Matters: The Impact of Power Exemplification of Transgender People in the News on Issue Attribution, Dehumanization, and Aggression Tendencies

Assistant Professor Minjie Li

Through integrating the theories of exemplification, attribution, and dehumanization, Li’s study experimentally investigates how the power exemplification of members from marginalized social groups like the transgender community in the news narrative interacts with the cisgender heterosexual audience’s sex to redirect people’s intergroup attitudes, responsibility attribution for transgender social issues, dehumanization, and aggression towards transgender people.

The findings, published in the Journalism Practice journal, demonstrated that after exposure to the news content featuring a high-power transgender woman exemplar, cisgender heterosexual women respondents reported significantly higher levels of dehumanization in regard to transgender people’s human nature.

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Read Li’s article