To Your Health: Self‐Regulation of Health Behavior Through Selective Exposure to Online Health Messages

Reaching target audiences is of crucial importance for the success of health communication campaigns, but individuals may avoid health messages if they challenge their beliefs or behaviors. A lab study (N = 419) examined effects of messages' consistency with participants' behavior and source credibility on selective exposure for 4 health lifestyle topics. Drawing on self‐regulation theory and dissonance theory, 3 motivations were examined: self‐bolstering, self‐motivating, and self‐defending. Prior behavior predicted selective exposure across topics, reflecting self‐bolstering. Standard‐behavior discrepancies also affected selective exposure, consistent with self‐motivating rather than self‐defending. Selective exposure to high‐credibility sources advocating for organic food, fruits and vegetable consumption, exercise, and limiting coffee all fostered accessibility of related standards, whereas messages from low‐credibility sources showed no such impact.     

Polarization and Partisan Selective Exposure

Today, people can easily select media outlets sharing their political predispositions, a behavior known as partisan selective exposure. Additional research is needed, however, to better understand the causes and consequences of partisan selective exposure. This study investigates the relationship between partisan selective exposure and political polarization using data from the National Annenberg Election Survey. Cross‐sectional results show strong evidence that partisan selective exposure is related to polarization. Over‐time analyses document that partisan selective exposure leads to polarization. Some evidence supports the reverse causal direction, namely that polarization leads to partisan selective exposure. Implications for the study of media effects and normative implications—both positive and negative—are discussed.     

Effects of Unresolved Factual Disputes in the News on Epistemic Political Efficacy

This experiment tests effects of passive, neutral reporting of contradictory factual claims on audiences. Exposure to such reporting is found to affect a new self‐efficacy construct developed in this study called epistemic political efficacy (EPE), which taps confidence in one's own ability to determine truth in politics. Measurement of EPE is found to be reliable and valid, and effects of neutral reporting on it are found to be conditional on prior interest in the issues under dispute. Implications of this effect and of EPE are discussed. Self‐efficacy theory ( Bandura, 1982 ) suggests these short‐term effects may accumulate over time. EPE may affect outcomes related to political understanding, opinion formation, and information seeking.     

Seek and You Shall Find? How Need for Orientation Moderates Knowledge Gain from Twitter Use

A Web‐based survey (N = 306) examined if Twitter use enhances individuals' news knowledge, and if so, how such effects might vary depending on their need for orientation (NFO) and the type of news (hard vs. soft). The duration of Twitter use positively predicted hard news knowledge, but only for those higher in NFO. In contrast, daily Twitter use had negative influence on high NFOs' soft news knowledge, with no corresponding effect for lows. Although high NFOs were more likely to use Twitter for information‐seeking than their less surveillance‐driven counterparts, such motivation did not facilitate knowledge gain. Systematic processing of public affairs information and selective avoidance were discussed as potential explanations for differential knowledge gain by high and low NFOs.     

Selective Use of News Cues: A Multiple‐Motive Perspective on Information Selection in Social Media Environments

This study investigated the effects of message and social cues on selective exposure to political information in a social media environment. Based on the heuristic‐systematic model, we hypothesized that readers' selective consideration of specific cues can be explained by situational motivations. In an experiment (N = 137), subjects primed with motivational goals (accuracy, defense, or impression motivations, as well as a control group) were asked to search for information. Participants preferred attitude‐consistent information and balanced information over attitude‐inconsistent information, and also preferred highly recommended articles. Defense‐motivated partisans exhibited a stronger confirmation bias, whereas impression motivation amplified the effects of social recommendations. These findings specify the conditions under which individuals engage in narrow, open‐minded, or social patterns of information selection.     

Dual‐Tone Patterned Mesoporous Silicate Films Templated From Chemically Amplified Block Copolymers

Directly patterned mesoporous silicate films are prepared using positive‐ and negative‐tone strategies by performing phase selective silica condensation within lithographically exposed poly(styrene‐b‐tert‐butyl acrylate) (PS‐b‐PtbA) templates containing photoacid generators. The use of supercritical fluid as a process medium enables rapid diffusion of the silicate precursor within the prepatterned block copolymer template film without disrupting its morphology. Template exposure through the mask triggers area selective generation of acid, which in turn both deprotects the poly(tert‐butyl acrylate) block to yield a poly(acrylic acid) block and provides a catalyst for silica precursor condensation yielding pattern formation at the device level. Because the acid generated in the UV exposed field preferentially segregates into hydrophilic poly(acrylic acid) domains of the phase segregated, deprotected block copolymer, precursor condensation is simultaneously controlled at nanoscopic length scales via templating by the underlying block copolymer morphology. The ability of PS‐b‐PtbA to undergo chemical transformation in two stages, deprotection followed by crosslinking, enables precise replications of the photomask in positive and negative tones. Detemplating via calcination yields patterned mesoporous silicate films without etching. Template formulations are optimized using infrared spectroscopic studies and the silicate films are characterized using electron microscopy and scanning force microscopy.     

Defining Media Enjoyment as the Satisfaction of Intrinsic Needs

This article presents a model of enjoyment rooted in self‐determination theory ( Deci & Ryan, 1985 ) that includes the satisfaction of three needs related to psychological well‐being: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. In an experiment designed to validate this conceptualization of enjoyment, we manipulate video game characteristics related to the satisfaction of these needs and examine their relative effects on enjoyment. The validated model explains 51% of the variance in enjoyment, even without including needs usually studied in relation to enjoyment such as pleasure seeking. Results indicate the utility of defining enjoyment as need satisfaction. These results are discussed in terms of a broader conceptualization of enjoyment represented as the satisfaction of a comprehensive set of functional needs.     

Reinforcement of the Political Self Through Selective Exposure to Political Messages

The idea that recipients prefer messages that reinforce preexisting attitudes and self‐perceptions has pervaded much communication research, but effects of selective exposure are rarely examined. This 2‐session experiment (n = 157) investigates such effects. The first session presented computerized questions on 12 political issue attitudes and political self‐concept. Accessibility data were collected based on response times. In the second session, participants browsed through an online magazine including 4 of the 12 issues, each issue being covered by 2 articles featuring opposing viewpoints. Selective exposure was logged and categorized as attitude‐consistent or counterattitudinal. Finally, a questionnaire repeated measures for attitudes and self‐concept. The results show that participants preferred attitude‐consistent over counterattitudinal messages, which strengthened the political self‐concept through increased accessibility.     

Heat‐Assisted Photoacidic Oxidation Method for Tailoring the Surface Chemistry of Polymer Dielectrics for Low‐Power Organic Soft Electronics

The use in low‐power soft electronics of the appropriate insulating polymer materials with a high dielectric constant (k) is considered a practical alternative to that of inorganic dielectric materials, which are brittle and have high processing temperatures. However, the polar surfaces of typical high‐k polymer insulators are problematic. Further, it is a huge challenge to control their surface properties without damage because of their soft and chemically fragile nature. Here, a heat‐assisted photoacidic oxidation method that can be used to effectively oxidize the outermost surfaces of high‐k rubbery polymer films without degradation is presented. The oxidized surfaces prepared with the developed method contain large numbers of hydroxyl groups that enable the subsequent growth of dense and ordered self‐assembled monolayers (SAMs) consisting of organosilanes. The whole process modifies the surface characteristics of polymer dielectrics effectively. The mechanisms of the oxidation of polymer surfaces and the subsequent SAM growth process are investigated. The resulting surface‐tailored rubbery dielectrics exhibit superior electrical characteristics when used in organic transistors. These results demonstrate that this method can be used to realize practical soft organic electronics based on high‐k polymer dielectrics.     

Turn a Blind Eye If You Care: Impacts of Attitude Consistency,Importance, and Credibility on Seeking of Political Information and Implications for Attitudes

Abundant media outlets allow for much diversity of political messages and selective use among citizens. A 2‐session online field study examined impacts of attitude consistency, attitude importance, and source credibility on selective exposure to political messages and subsequent attitude accessibility. The first session assessed attitudes and their accessibility. In the second session, participants browsed online search results that featured attitude‐consistent and attitude‐discrepant messages associated with sources of either high or low credibility; selective reading was tracked. Then attitude accessibility was measured again. Participants spent less time with attitude‐discrepant messages compared to attitude‐consistent messages; this pattern was particularly pronounced among participants with higher attitude importance. Low importance fostered exposure to high‐credibility messages. Exposure to attitude‐discrepant, high‐credibility messages reduced attitude accessibility.     

Risk Information Seeking and Processing Model: A Meta‐Analysis

This study relies on state‐of‐the‐art meta‐analytical techniques to assess overall effects of the Risk Information Seeking and Processing (RISP) model. The results support the utility of the RISP model in predicting risk information seeking and systematic processing. However, the model demonstrated limited explanatory power for heuristic processing. A reduced model composed of only 2 variables—current knowledge and informational subjective norms—accounted for a substantial proportion of variance in the outcome variables. This more parsimonious explanation of information seeking and systematic processing might extend the utility of the RISP model to other communication settings not related to risk. Theoretical boundaries of the RISP model and implications for future research are discussed.     

Selective Exposure and Reinforcement of Attitudes and Partisanship Before a Presidential Election

Right before the 2008 U.S. presidential election, this 2‐session online field study examined consequences of selective exposure to political messages on accessibility of attitudes and of partisanship. In the first session, participants indicated attitudes toward political issues and their partisanship, which allowed measuring accessibility of attitudes and of partisanship. In the second session, participants browsed articles. Four issues were covered by 8 articles, with 2 articles featuring opposing perspectives. Selective exposure was unobtrusively logged. Finally, participants completed measures for attitudes and partisanship again. Selective exposure to attitude‐consistent articles was linked to greater attitude accessibility. The indirect impact of selective exposure on partisanship accessibility through attitude accessibility was significant.     

Framing,Motivated Reasoning,and Opinions About Emergent Technologies

How do individuals form opinions about new technologies? What role does factual information play? We address these questions by incorporating 2 dynamics, typically ignored in extant work: information competition and over‐time processes. We present results from experiments on 2 technologies: carbon‐nanotubes and genetically modified foods. We find that factual information is of limited utility—it does not have a greater impact than other background factors (e.g., values), it adds little power to newly provided arguments/frames (e.g., compared to arguments lacking facts), and it is perceived in biased ways once individuals form clear initial opinions (e.g., motivated reasoning). Our results provide insight into how individuals form opinions over time, and bring together literatures on information, framing, and motivated reasoning.     

FEROM: Feature Extraction and Refinement for Opinion Mining

Opinion mining involves the analysis of customer opinions using product reviews and provides meaningful information including the polarity of the opinions. In opinion mining, feature extraction is important since the customers do not normally express their product opinions holistically but separately according to its individual features. However, previous research on feature‐based opinion mining has not had good results due to drawbacks, such as selecting a feature considering only syntactical grammar information or treating features with similar meanings as different. To solve these problems, this paper proposes an enhanced feature extraction and refinement method called FEROM that effectively extracts correct features from review data by exploiting both grammatical properties and semantic characteristics of feature words and refines the features by recognizing and merging similar ones. A series of experiments performed on actual online review data demonstrated that FEROM is highly effective at extracting and refining features for analyzing customer review data and eventually contributes to accurate and functional opinion mining.     

Light‐modulated TiOx Interlayer Dipole and Contact Activation in Organic Solar Cell Cathodes

Understanding working mechanisms of selective interfacial layers and the underlying energetics of the organic semiconductor/electrode interface is an issue of primary concern for improving organic solar cell technologies. TiO _x interlayers are used here to tune the selectivity of the cathode contact to electrons by controlled UV‐light activation. The S‐shaped kink observed for deactivated titania interlayers completely disappears after 2 min of UV‐light exposure yielding high fill factor (≈60%) and adequate efficiencies. UV‐light activation of complete cells alters the work function of the oxide that decreases about 650 mV as observed by Kelvin probe measurements. Capacitive techniques reveals a light‐intensity dependent shift in flat‐band voltage of up to 1.2 V under 1 sun illumination (without UV) in the case of deactivated TiO _x interlayers. An increase in the magnitude of the light‐modulated dipole present at the oxide layer accounts for that voltage shift. Although the sign of the interface dipole would favor the extraction of electrons, the concomitant modification of the band bending in the organic semiconductor hinders an efficient extraction of carriers at positive voltages and originates the S‐shaped characteristics. After contact activation, the dipole strength does not change with the light intensity.     

Oxygen Ion Drift‐Induced Complementary Resistive Switching in Homo TiOx/TiOy/TiOx and Hetero TiOx/TiON/TiOx Triple Multilayer Frameworks

Developing a means by which to compete with commonly used Si‐based memory devices represents an important challenge for the realization of future three‐dimensionally stacked crossbar‐array memory devices with multifunctionality. Therefore, oxide‐based resistance switching memory (ReRAM), with its associated phenomena of oxygen ion drifts under a bias, is becoming increasingly important for use in nanoscalable crossbar arrays with an ideal memory cell size due to its simple metal–insulator–metal structure and low switching current of 10–100 μA. However, in a crossbar array geometry, one single memory element defined by the cross‐point of word and bit lines is highly susceptible to unintended leakage current due to parasitic paths around neighboring cells when no selective devices such as diodes or transistors are used. Therefore, the effective complementary resistive switching (CRS) features in all Ti‐oxide‐based triple layered homo Pt/TiO_x/TiO_y/TiO_x/Pt and hetero Pt/TiO_x/TiON/TiO_x/Pt geometries as alternative resistive switching matrices are reported. The possible resistive switching nature of the novel triple matrices is also discussed together with their electrical and structural properties. The ability to eliminate both an external resistor for efficient CRS operation and a metallic Pt middle electrode for further cost‐effective scalability will accelerate progress toward the realization of cross‐bar ReRAM in this framework.     

A Coating that Combines Lotus‐Effect and Contact‐Active Antimicrobial Properties on Silicone

The antimicrobial equipment of materials is of great importance in medicine but also in daily life. A challenge is the antimicrobial modification of hydrophobic surfaces without increasing their low surface energy. This is particularly important for silicone‐based materials. Because most antimicrobial surface modifications render the materials more hydrophilic, methods are needed to achieve antimicrobial activity without changing the high water‐contact‐angle. This is achieved in the present work, where SiO₂ nanoparticles are prepared and functionalized with 3‐(trimethoxysilyl)‐propyldimethyloctadecyl ammonium chloride (QAS) in a one‐pot synthesis. The modified nanoparticles are applied onto a silicone surface from suspension with no need of elaborate pretreatment. The resulting surface exhibits a Lotus‐Effect combined with contact‐active antimicrobial properties. The particle surfaces show self‐organizing micro‐ and nanostructures that afford a water‐contact angle of 144° and a hysteresis below 10°. The particles are self‐adhering on the silicone after solvent evaporation and resistant against immersion into and washing with water for at least 5 d. Thereby, the adhesion of the bacterial strain Staphylococcus aureus to these surfaces is reduced and the remaining bacterial cells are killed within 16 h. This is the first example of a Lotus‐Effect surface with intrinsic contact‐active antimicrobial properties.     

Self‐Aligned and Scalable Growth of Monolayer WSe2–MoS2 Lateral Heterojunctions

2D layered heterostructures have attracted intensive interests due to their unique optical, transport, and interfacial properties. The laterally stitched heterojunction based on dissimilar 2D transition metal dichalcogenides forms an intrinsic p–n junction without the necessity of applying an external voltage. However, no scalable processes are reported to construct the devices with such lateral heterostructures. Here, a scalable strategy, two‐step and location‐selective chemical vapor deposition, is reported to synthesize self‐aligned WSe₂–MoS₂ monolayer lateral heterojunction arrays and demonstrates their light‐emitting devices. The proposed fabrication process enables the growth of high‐quality interfaces and the first successful observation of electroluminescence at the WSe₂–MoS₂ lateral heterojunction. The electroluminescence study has confirmed the type‐I alignment at the interface rather than commonly believed type‐II alignment. This self‐aligned growth process paves the way for constructing various 2D lateral heterostructures in a scalable manner, practically important for integrated 2D circuit applications.     

The Role of Actors' Race in White Audiences' Selective Exposure to Movies

Movie producers are often reluctant to cast more than a few minority actors in otherwise race‐neutral movies for fear that the White audience will largely avoid such films. Two experiments were conducted to test the idea that the racial makeup of a cast could influence White audiences' selective exposure to movies. Results revealed that actors' race does influence selective exposure in certain contexts. For nonromantic movies, participants' racial attitudes moderated the relationship between race and selective exposure. For romantic movies, regardless of racial attitudes, White participants showed significantly less interest in seeing movies with mostly Black casts than in seeing movies with mostly White casts. These findings are discussed in light of both social identity theory and social cognitive theory.     

Metallic 1T‐WS2 for Selective Impedimetric Vapor Sensing

Selective gas sensing is of immense importance for industrial as well as safety purposes. Here it is shown that metallic 1T phase transition metal dichalcogenides, such as tungsten sulfide (WS₂), provide sensitive and selective platform for gas sensing. Using impedance spectroscopy distinguishable alterations can be detected on the impedance phase spectrum of interdigitated gold electrode modified with chemically exfoliated 1T‐WS₂ caused by different vapors. In particular, it is found that the impedance phase spectra of 1T‐WS₂ device present different resonant frequencies with maximum around 1 Hz in the presence of methanol vapor and around 1 kHz in the presence of water vapor. Such a well‐distinguished signal allows their selective detection also when they are present in a mixture. The impedance phase spectra allow the selective methanol and water vapor sensing with an impedimetric device based on 1T‐WS₂. This system utilizing 1T phase of WS₂ for selective gas sensing based on impedance spectroscopy opens new avenues for gas sensing and shall find wide spectra of applications.