Dissertation Topic and Research Interests

My research is empirical and broadly looks at media effects from a consumer psychology perspective. Primarily, my research interests lie in the psychological effects of media context and contextual factors on the processing and evaluation of digital advertising in various formats, including online video ads, native ads, and web-mediated messages. As a secondary research interest lies in the psychological effects associated with emerging marketing communication forms, such as retargeting.

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My dissertation continues my interest in media context and technology-enabled ad interaction. It further introduces a message feature of arousal spike. My dissertation aims to answer the overarching questions of when and how in-stream video ads generate less ad avoidance and yield positive ad responses by looking at the role of arousal spike position, ad position, and user control.

 

Reasons for Joining AEJMC

AEJMC enjoys a high reputation among scholars in journalism and mass communication. While there were many reasons I became an AEJMC member, the primary reason was that I wanted to be more engaged with the journalism and mass communication academic community.

 

Being an AEJMC member, I benefited in many aspects. For example, at the 2020 AEJMC Conference, I gained valuable feedback on our accepted work, broadened my social network, and had a better understating of the job market by attending relevant sessions.

What is your favorite AEJMC memory?

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Favorite AEJMC Memory

My favorite memory is that our work was selected as the third-place top faculty paper award in the Advertising Division at the 2020 AJEMC Conference. It is a recognition of the effort my co-authors and I put into this project. The comments we received from the reviewers, the session participants, and our session discussant (Dr. Anastasia Kononova) were very helpful in improving our manuscript.

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Advice You'd Give Your Past Self When Starting Grad School

For my Ph.D. program, I would tell her to spend more time on different theories and models from psychology because they are fun and will benefit your consumer-psychology-oriented research.

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Fun (and Little Known) Fact About Yourself

I like stand-up comedy a lot. I think comedians often provide a different perspective to view life. Their witty jokes and stories sometimes make me think about how things really work in the society.

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Future Career Goals

I hope to work in the academia as a professor in advertising or strategic communication.

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Question You'd Like to Ask Other Graduate Students

If you were to recommend a book that had most influence on your academic journey, what would it be?

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(Posted November 2020)

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