The United States has engaged in military conflicts both honorable and questionable. Journalists have traveled to the front lines to produce stories and pictures both supportive and critical. A content analysis of images published in three U.S. newspapers during the start of the 1991 and 2003 wars with Iraq reveals that the military probably received the type of coverage it hoped for when it initiated the embedding program.

The article describes two research programs on the syntactic abilities of hearing impaired and normal hearing individuals. The first program was concerned with describing some of the syntactic problems of deaf students in acquiring English structure; the second involved the construction of the Test of Syntactic Abilities and its application to deaf, hard of hearing, and normal hearing students in the United States, Canada, and Australia. This report has four objectives: (1) to summarize and integrate the findings of the two research programs, (2) to relate the findings to the literature on other populations, (3) to discuss strategies used by the research populations in handling English syntax, and (4) to discuss some applications of the findings to language development.

This study examines how the Internet context (website) within which advertisements (banners) are embedded influences ad effectiveness. Respondents evaluated banners after they reviewed a website in which a contextually relevant banner and a contextually irrelevant banner were placed. Results suggest that (1) a contextually relevant banner induced more favorable evaluation and a greater purchase intention toward advertised products than a contextually irrelevant counterpart, and (2) neither a contextually relevant banner nor a contextually irrelevant banner wasrecalled with better accuracy than the other banner. These findings provide implications for future consumer research and website promotion.

The theory of excitation transfer has been used to explain why residual stimulation from a program can heighten response to commercials aired within the program. This research examines the reverse phenomenon with commercial humor levels affecting the program. Higher humor levels in otherwise identical commercials were shown to enhance viewer enjoyment of humorous television programs in a 2 × 2 × 2 experimental design. Programs were rated on a composite measure labeled “program entertainment value.”

This experimental investigation explores the use of humor in violent action films, focusing on the effects of wisecracking heroes and villains on audience distress. An action film was edited to create control film versions without wisecracking dialogue. The research revealed contrast effects. Among female viewers, hero wisecracks in an action film increased distress reactions to the film, but lessened distressful reactions to subsequent televised depictions of real, nonhumorous violence. Conversely, males exposed to hero humor found the film marginally less distressing, but rated depictions of real violence more distressing. For all viewers, effects of villain wisecracks tended to parallel females' reactions to hero wisecracks. Disposition theory is offered as a plausible explanation of study findings.