- Sponsor
- Department of Psychology
- Speaker
- Dr. Stewart Coles, Assistant Professor, Department of Communication
- Views
- 38
- Originating Calendar
- Psychology General Calendar
The Psychology Department is excited to continue the First Friday Psychology-Beckman Colloquium Series for the 2026-2027 academic year, a monthly event designed to bring together members of the Department of Psychology, Beckman Institute, and beyond for engaging, cross-area conversations.
On the first Friday of each month, join us from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM for faculty-led lectures, panel discussions, and research spotlights that showcase the breadth and depth of work happening in psychological science at UIUC.
Join us on October 2 to hear from Dr. Stewart Coles, Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication.
Prior research acknowledges the potential implications of how media users evaluate media texts as being relevant to politics. Concurrently, technological advances have brought with them an explosion in the amount of media available to consumers, particularly fictional entertainment programming depicting “implicitly” political content such as social issues. Although exposure to entertainment media is fractured along political lines, there remains an assumption that most viewers choose their entertainment media absent of political considerations. Using the politically relevant media model and a novel multidimensional measure for how users evaluate media texts as politically relevant, Dr. Coles links the strength of people’s political identities to their selective exposure to fictional entertainment. This work has implications for political polarization and a growing cultural divide in the United States.