Feature Channels: Social Media

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A team of researchers led by Celia Klin, associate professor of psychology and associate dean at Binghamton University’s Harpur College, recruited 126 Binghamton undergraduates, who read a series of exchanges that appeared either as text messages or as handwritten notes. Based on the participants’ responses, text messages that ended with a period were rated as less sincere than text messages that did not end with a period.

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Researchers at the University of Georgia have found links between certain patterns of connections among Facebook friends and drug and alcohol use among college-aged females.

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Emotional appeal is among the factors increasing the chance that disaster communiques posted on social media by emergency management agencies will be retransmitted by recipients, researchers at the University of California, Irvine and the University of Kentucky have found.

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Blurred boundaries between advertising and public relations professions due to new roles in social media raise the question of whether educators can adequately prepare their students for a career in those growing fields, according to a Baylor study.

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Social media has become engrained into almost every area of our life, but should you really be Facebook friends with your doctor?

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Facebook can have positive and negative effects on teens levels of a stress hormone, say researchers at the University of Montreal and the Institut universitaire de santé mentale de Montréal.

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From terrorist propaganda distributed by organizations such as ISIS, to political activism, diverse voices now use social media as their major public platform. Organizations deploy bots — virtual, automated posters — as well as enormous paid “armies” of human posters or trolls, and hacking schemes to overwhelmingly infiltrate the public platform with their message. A University of Arkansas at Little Rock professor of information science has been awarded a grant to continue his research that will provide an in-depth understanding of the major propagators of viral, insidious content and the methods that make them successful.

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What can you tell about people and their situations from only 140 characters? Apparently, quite a lot according to a new study about Twitter. Researchers from FAU used more than 20 million Tweets to study the psychological characteristics of real-world situations that people actually experienced over the course of two weeks.

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New research led by physicists at the University of Warwick has used tools designed to study social networks to gain significant new insights into the Northern Lights, and space weather – particularly the interaction of events in the sun’s atmosphere with Earth’s ionosphere.

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Two Mississippi State researchers continue work on a two-year study of how social media may be better applied during extreme weather events that disrupt normal communication channels.The investigation by John F. Edwards and Somya Mohanty began in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the deadliest and most destructive storm of the 2012 Atlantic season and second-costliest hurricane in United States history.

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Paul R. Brewer, Director of the University of Delaware's Center for Political Communication, led a team that found that peers' comments on social media have more sway over potential voters than the actual political candidates.

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Tourists in San Francisco witnessed a Great White Shark feeding on a seal in the bay while waiting to depart on the Alcatraz Ferry. A camera atop the ferry captured the attack in full.

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Researchers at University of New Mexico and the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory say cybersecurity breeches are not happening more frequently than they did a decade ago. And these data breaches in general are not growing in size.

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Language used in everyday social media posts may have a strong connection to an individual’s health. In the first study of its kind, the new results suggest that not only are many adult Facebook and Twitter users willing to share their social media data and medical data for research purposes, but that by building a language databank, it may be possible to link social media content to health outcomes.

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When Facebook users see favorable comments on the social media site about a political candidate, those opinions positively influence their own views of the politician, while unfavorable comments have a negative effect, according to a new paper by University of Delaware researchers.

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At 11 a.m. EDT Thursday, September 10 the Airline Quality Report will be presented live and reporters will be able to engage with one of the study's co-authors.

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A University of Iowa (UI) sociologist and his co-researchers are the first to use the Internet and social media to systematically show how a documentary film reshaped public perception and ultimately led to municipal bans on hydraulic fracking.

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Despite the growing use of online support groups such as those on Facebook to help curb substance abuse, attending traditional face-to-face meetings may continue to be more effective for people trying to maintain sobriety, according to research presented at the American Psychological Association’s 123rd Annual Convention.

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Are your plants dead or dying? New Mexico State University has an online Plant Diagnostic Clinic that might be able to help. Experts provide advice for homeowners, landscape professionals, nursery retailers and government agencies can find a photographs of plant problems to compare plant conditions.

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College women who are more emotionally invested in Facebook and have lots of Facebook friends are less concerned with body size and shape and less likely to engage in risky dieting behaviors. But that’s only if they aren’t using Facebook to compare their bodies to their friends’ bodies, according to the authors of a surprising new study at the University of North Carolina School of Medicine.

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Technology has fueled the fascination with selfies. Two Iowa State professors talk about the selfie trend and why more entertainment venues will follow Disney's lead to ban selfie sticks.

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Vermont scientists have invented a new technique for discovering potentially dangerous drug interactions--before they show up in medical databases like PubMed--by searching millions of tweets on Twitter.

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A large number of patients use online communication tools such as email and Facebook to engage with their physicians, despite recommendations from some hospitals and professional organizations that clinicians limit email contact with patients and avoid “friending” patients on social media, new research suggests.

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If you get a warm, fuzzy feeling after watching cute cat videos online, the effect may be more profound than you think, according to research from The Media School at Indiana University.

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An international team of researchers from Indiana University and Switzerland is using data mapping methods created to track the spread of information on social networks to trace its dissemination across a surprisingly different system: the human brain.

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UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. -- While some may argue that life on social media is a never-ending popularity contest, teens and adults may use online apps for very different purposes. Researchers at Penn State’s College of Information Sciences and Technology (IST) have found that teens are leveraging social media as a conversation space and an outlet for self-expression to a greater extent than adults, and are also more focused on posting photos that attract attention.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: new drug for heart disease, astronomy, sleep, stroke, diabetes, materials science, MERS, and U.S. Politics.

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An analysis of Twitter hashtag use on the subject of diabetes provides new insights about spreading health information through social media. The study, led by Jenine Harris, PhD, assistant professor at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, looked at the hashtag #diabetes and its interaction with two Twitter measures of engagement, retweeting and favoriting.

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Mobile devices are ubiquitous—including in the college classroom. Instructors across disciplines now compete with a host of electronic stimuli for students’ attention. But to what extent is messaging interfering with student learning? Can students concentrate with the same intensity while exchanging texts with their friends and family? A new study published in the National Communication Association’s journal, Communication Education, evaluates how different types of messaging impact student retention of classroom material.

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A false tweet from a hacked account owned by the Associated Press demonstrates the need to better understand how social media data is linked to decision making in the private and public sector, according to University at Buffalo research.

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Researchers and public health officials have looked for ways to better understand the health concerns of transgender populations, so social "big data" technologies like Twitter offer an untapped rich source of information that they can use for the benefit of these communities

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: social media trends, lyme disease, cancer, diabetes, HIV, lasers, Hubble, neurology, and the seafood industry.

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Robert W. Gehl, assistant professor of communication at the University of Utah, is scouring the Internet for what he calls "alternative social media" sites and services built as a critical response to corporate social media. He is cataloging what he finds in the Social Media Alternatives Project (S-MAP).

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In today’s pop culture, it is hard to beat the current zombie upsurge; from TV drama like “The Walking Dead” to movies such as “Resident Evil,” the devilish figures have invaded public consciousness. They are apparently popular in public relations, too, judging by the number of campaigns using zombie-related humor to generate buzz on social media platforms. But how successful are these PR strategies in the context of risk communication? A new study published in the National Communication Association’s Journal of Applied Communication Research reveals that the match between social media and humor may not be made in heaven, after all.

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For the first time, Texas Tech turned to Snapchat to help admitted students feel connected to the university and encourage them to attend in the fall.

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In a new study from Johns Hopkins University, two researchers have taken this idea a step further to consider how tweets affect the performances of initial public offerings (IPOs). They believe that their paper is the first to look closely at the connection between Twitter sentiment and IPOs.

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Research from Rutgers Cancer Institute of New Jersey and Rutgers School of Public Health shows more than a third of New Jersey high school students who engage in indoor tanning do so frequently and many would find it hard to stop the practice. Investigators also found that frequent indoor tanners were more likely to smoke and to engage in social media activities related to indoor tanning.

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WVU sociologist professor Jason Manning outlines the social conditions that breed online complaining and hashtag activism.

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Trending news releases with the most views in a single day. Topics include: fertility, same-sex marriage, mobile apps, IL tornado, Clinton running for President, violence against women, CA water crisis, medical research

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The study, led by Professor Paul Brewer from the University of Delaware’s Center for Political Communication suggests that her earlier use of Twitter successfully generated TV coverage, and that TV coverage helped her image among viewers.

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Most often on Twitter, those we engage with are like-minded, and the ensuing electronic maelstrom of 140-character missives serves to reinforce, pulling us and them further along in the direction we were already trending toward. All that sound and fury can signify something, however: researchers in Spain have recently developed a model to detect the extent to which a conversation on Twitter -- and thus the actual offline argument and political climate -- is polarized.

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Aside from the societal increase and prevalence of social media, Dr. Stephanie Pope discovered that doctors and patients sometimes blur lines of their relationships. Instances where social media research of patients in treatment helped to prevent injury were recorded, while definitive, institutional policy and procedures were sorely lagging causing potential issues in patient care.

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First impressions matter, so keep your social media accounts and your reputation clean and classy when searching for a job.

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A new Roanoke College study finds a gender difference in Facebook jealousy when it comes to emoticon usage.

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Do parents go too far when it comes to creating a digital identity for their kids?

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Storytelling energizes online social movements, but social media exposure does not equal political influence, a new-media scholar at the University of Illinois at Chicago explains in her new book.