Lab | Teaching > Political Communication & Behavior Lab

The PCB Lab is focused on the intersection between political communication and political behavior. We study the nature of news and social media, and the effects that media have on our political decision-making. We rely on a range of social-scientific methods including surveys, automated content analysis, and psychophysiological studies. Recent work from lab members has examined platform-based differences in both sentiment and campaign communication, cognitive dissonance and selective exposure, valence-based biases in news consumption, and news coverage of political figures and policies.

PCB Lab members include both current and former graduate students:

• Current Students

  • Rachel Berwald, Political Science, UCLA

  • Mia Carbone, PhD student, Communication, UCLA

  • Jennifer Hwang, PhD student, Communication, UCLA

  • Seonhye Noh, PhD student, Communication, UCLA

• Former Students

  • Sydney Carr, Assistant Professor, Political Science, College of the Holy Cross

  • Sarah Fioroni, Senior Research Consultant, Gallup

  • Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Assistant Professor, Advertising + PR, Michigan State University

  • Guadalupe (Lupita) Madrigal, Assistant Professor, Communication, University of California, Santa Barbara

  • Gavin Ploger, Howard R. Marsh Postdoctoral Fellow, Communication and Media, University of Michigan

I and my students are also members of the Communication and Politics Group at UCLA.

Here are some recent papers involving PCB lab members:

• Gavin Ploger. 2024. “Polarization all the way down: How coverage of elite and partisan polarization spills over to perceptions of the U.S. mass public.” Political Communication 41(3).

• Sol Hart, Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice and Stuart Soroka. 2024. “Go Negative for Clicks: Negative Sentiment in Environmental Advocacy Emails is Associated with Increased Public Engagement,” Environmental Communication.

• Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Guadalupe Madrigal, Gavin Ploger, Sydney Carr, Mia Carbone, Ava Francesca Battocchio, and Stuart Soroka. 2024. “Identity Driven Information Ecosystems.” Communication Theory.

• Mia Carbone, Stuart Soroka and Johanna Dunaway. 2024. “The Psychophysiology of News Avoidance: Does Negative Affect Drive both Attention and Inattention to News?,” Journalism Studies.

• Mia Carbone, Allison Harell and Stuart Soroka. 2024. “Critical Race Theory: How Policy Language Differentially Engages Symbolic Racism and Partisanship,” Perspectives on Politics.

• Guadelupe Madrigal. 2024. “The effects of family and community in US immigration news.” Politics, Groups and Identities.

• Gulsah Akcakir, Yanru Jiang, Jun Luo, and Seonhye Noh. 2023. “Validating a Mixed-Method Approach for Multilingual News Framing Analysis:: A Case Study of COVID-19.” Computational Communication Research 5(2).

• Guadalupe Madrigal. 2023. “The American Dreamers: The Effects of Media Coverage of Immigrants’ Age-at-Arrival.” Political Research Quarterly 76(4).

• Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Fabian Neuner and Stuart Soroka. 2023. “Cued by Culture: Political Imagery and Partisan Evaluations.” Political Behavior 25.

• Guadalupe Madrigal and Stuart Soroka. 2023. “Migrants, caravans, and perceptions of threat: The impact of news photos on immigration attitudes,” The International Journal of Press/Politics 28(1).

• Guadalupe Madrigal. 2023. “Community Matters: Content Analysis of Children in Immigration Media Coverage, 1990-2020.” Political Communication 40(5).

• Andrea Benjamin and Sydney L. Carr. 2022. “Does Incumbency Matter?: Black Voter Support for Non-Incumbent POC Democratic Candidates in the 2018 Congressional House of Representative Elections,” National Review of Black Politics.

• Stuart Soroka and Mia Carbone. 2022. “Gatekeeping, Technology, and Polarization,” Oxford Research Encyclopedia.

• Matea Mustafaj, Guadalupe Madrigal, Jessica Roden, Gavin W. Ploger. 2022. “Physiological threat sensitivity predicts anti-immigrant attitudes,” Politics and the Life Sciences 41(1).

• Sarah Bachleda Fioroni, Amanda D. Lotz, Stuart Soroka & Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice. 2022. “Political sorting in U.S. entertainment media,” Popular Communication 20(2).

• Gavin Ploger, Patrick Fournier, Johanna Dunaway and Stuart Soroka. 2021. “The Psychophysiological Correlates of Cognitive Dissonance,”  Politics and the Life Sciences 40(2).

• Sarah Bachleda Fioroni and Stuart Soroka. 2021. “Emotion,” The Psychology of Journalism, Sharon Coen and Peter Bull, eds., Oxford University Press.

• Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Stuart Soroka and Christopher Wlezien. 2021. “Freedom of the Press and Public Responsiveness,” Perspectives on Politics 19(2).

• Sarah Bachleda, Fabian Neuner, Stuart Soroka, Lauren Guggenheim, Patrick Fournier and Elin Naurin. 2020. “Individual-level differences in negativity biases in news selection.” Personality and Individual Differences 155(1).

• Stuart Soroka, Mark Daku, Dan Hiaeshutter-Rice, Lauren Guggenheim and Josh Pasek. 2018. “Negativity and Positivity Biases in Economic News Coverage: Traditional Versus Social Media.” Communication Research 45(7).

I did not have lab groups while I was in the Department of Political Science at McGill University but I did get to supervise some terrific Phd students. Check out:

• Blake Andrew, Meridian Trot

• Kelly Blidook, Memorial University

• Marc André Bodet, Université de Laval

• Anthony Kevins, Loughborough University

• Andrea Lawlor, McMaster University