Three students win top paper honors at NCA
Media School doctoral candidates won three of the four top student paper honors at the 101st annual National Communication Association conference Nov. 19-22 in Las Vegas.
Daphna Yeshua-Katz, Ashley Kraus and Teresa Lynch attended the conference and collected plaques honoring their and their co-authors’ work. They also presented their work to colleagues and attendees.
Daphna Yeshua-Katz is the sole author of “Communicating Stigma and Social Support: A Comparative Analysis of Online Communities,” which considers the idea that the Web is a safe haven for people stigmatized offline.
Kraus presented the paper she co-authored with another Media School Ph.D. student Nancy Tyree and Indiana State University’s Matthew Blaszka. They wrote “Winning Bodies: A Content Analysis of Body Imagery Within Competitive Reality Programs.” Their study looks at the body sizes of male and female competitors on reality programs and how their sizes affect where they place in the competition.
Lynch’s paper, “Sexy, Strong, and Secondary: An Analysis of the Portrayal of Female Video Game Characters from 1983 to 2014,” was co-authored with Media School doctoral students Jessica Tompkins, Irene van Driel and Niki Fritz. It analyzes the physical changes in female video game characters from 571 games created between 1983 and 2014.
Lynch presented the paper and appeared at two other seminars about her different research work:
- She presented “Exploring the Paradox of Intragroup Hostility in Intergroup Competition” at the Game Studies Division Preconference. The paper examines how being mean to teammates in video games affects enjoyment.
- She also presented “Are Women Bad for the Box Office? The Role of Actor Sex in Anticipated Enjoyment of Films.” It considers the film industry’s perception of actresses as leads in movies.