Endorser and Bodily Addressing in Public Service Announcements: Effects and Underlying Mechanisms

Effects of immersive storytelling on affective, cognitive, and associative empathy: The mediating role of presence

“…As the current study only included unidirectional story consumption, user response questionnaires did not include measures of users’ perceived interactivity; however, future research designs may systematically vary the level of interactivity afforded by user interfaces in empathy contexts—ideally by directly manipulating the range of interactions permitted in different versions of a mediated environment, thereby controlling for other potential differences between navigating such spaces and 360° video viewing—to elucidate the relationships between immersion, perceived interactivity, particular elements of spatial presence and, in turn, different dimensions of empathy (including perspective-taking). In addition, though validated (Shen, 2010b) and found reliable in previous research (e.g., Cooke et al, 2018; Liu and Wei, 2018; Wei et al, 2019), the cognitive empathy scale used in the current study yielded relatively low internal consistency. It is possible that the context of the news stories used in this study (i.e., homelessness and displacement), which focused on macro-level social issues, may have influenced the efficacy of the cognitive empathy scale as prior studies have applied the same scale to more micro-level health and interpersonal contexts (e.g., anti-smoking and sexual abuse behaviors, online support through social media, and conflict resolution between friends).…”

“…Finally, the current study expressly employed a multidimensional approach to empathy so as to gain potential insights into the mixed findings collectively provided by past research on immersion and empathy. With the value of a multidimensional explication of empathy evidenced in the current context, and given the previous findings of Wei et al (2019) in the context of PSAs, future work may move beyond empathy as the outcome variable of interest and examine how different dimensions of empathetic responses to immersive news stories may impact downstream effects, including persuasion or memory of story content. That is, future research can consider the distinct mediation pathways leading to various affective and cognitive affordances for which the direct affordances of immersive media examined here (e.g., presence, empathy) are antecedents (Shin, 2017).…”

“…In addition, the value in examining these dimensions independently is highlighted by previous work finding they serve as unique pathways to particular downstream effects. For instance, Wei et al (2019) found associative empathy to uniquely mediate the effect of public service announcements (PSAs) on advocated values and behavioral intention.…”

Public service announcements: A literature review and way forward

“…PSAs use celebrities extensively in the popular press (Wei et al, 2019) has suggested that the use of celebrities may not be wise. For instance, Leung and Cheng (2016) showed that PSAs featuring experts were more efficacious than PSAs featuring celebrities.…”

Causes of Heterosexual People’s Changing Attitudes Towards Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Group

“…These will enable more people to change their negative thoughts about the LGBT group. Since the effect of role models is far-reaching in public so that it can be assumed that more people will have an equal perspective of the LGBT community because fans will be more disposed to chase or trust certain concepts of their role models [13].…”