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Silvia Knobloch-Westerwick, Ashley R. Kennard, Axel Westerwick, Laura E. Willis, and Yuan Gong. A Crack in the Crystal Ball? Prolonged Exposure to Media Portrayals of Social Roles Affect Possible Future Selves.  Communication Research, August 2014; vol. 41, 6: pp. 739-759.

A prolonged-exposure experiment, spanning 10 days, investigated how gender-typed portrayals in magazines affect young women’s visions of their personal future. Competing hypotheses regarding impacts on possible future selves were derived from social cognitive theory and social comparison theory. Women (N = 215) viewed magazine pages with females in either professional or caretaker roles, as beauty ideals, or without individuals (control group). Gender-typed roles remained salient 3 days after last exposure. Portrayals of professionals and caretakers instigated more negative responses related to personal future than beauty ideals. Thus, despite much advocacy for increasing the number of strong female role models in the media, the perpetuation of traditional beauty ideals makes women feel more positively about their future.

Zheng Wang. Bridging Media Processing and Selective Exposure: A Dynamic Motivational Model of Media Choices and Choice Response Time. Communication Research, December 2014; vol. 41, 8: pp. 1064-1087.

Based on the dynamic motivational activation (DMA) theoretical framework, a dynamic choice model of channel changing behavior, called the ChaCha model, was developed and submitted to empirical testing. The ChaCha model integrates the motivated media processing and selective exposure behavior, and formalizes their reciprocal, recursive dynamic influences. It incorporates a logistic type of ratio of strength choice model, a reinforcement learning model, and the diffusion model of choice time to simultaneously predict sequential media channel choices and channel viewing durations. Real-time channel choice data from a selective exposure TV viewing experiment were used to test the model and to illustrate how this model can be further used to understand dynamic cognitive mechanisms underlying the observed media choice behavior.