About
Communication Studies at UCLA is an interdisciplinary program that encompasses such highly contemporary areas as new technology, media effects, First Amendment law, and the telecommunication industry. Other areas of research include persuasion, political communication, history of communication, emotions, and evolutionary psychology.
Department of Communication
Cross-cultural laughter data Phase II
Data and R code for manuscript "The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies."
Country-of-Origin as Visual Communication: How Labels Shape Meaning in the Global Marketplace
This departmental honors thesis examines how country-of-origin labels ("Made in Italy," "Made in USA," & "Made in Japan") function as visual communication cues through a survey-based experimental design. By comparing responses across conditions, the research explores how the "Made in" visual marker carries broader cultural, political, and symbolic meanings.
The Politics of Feeling: Contemporary Japanese Art & Anti-War Narratives
Under the instruction of Professor Von Blum, this research paper examines how contemporary Japanese anti-war artists use affect, memory, and visual culture to communicate political resistance.
Cross-cultural laughter data Phase II
Data and R code for manuscript "The perception of spontaneous and volitional laughter across 21 societies."
Prosody in Infant-Directed Speech Is Similar Across Western and Traditional Cultures
When speaking to infants, adults typically alter the acoustic properties of their speech in a variety of ways compared with how they speak to other adults; for example, they use higher pitch, increased pitch range, more pitch variability, and slower speech rate. Research shows that these vocal changes happen similarly across industrialized populations, but no studies have carefully examined basic acoustic properties of infant-directed (ID) speech in traditional societies. Moreover, some scholars have suggested that ID speech is culturally specific and does not exist in some small-scale societies. We examined fundamental frequency (F0) production and speech rate in mothers speaking to both infants and adults in three cultures: Fijians, Kenyans, and North Americans. In all three cultures, speakers used higher F0 when speaking to infants relative to when speaking to other adults, and they also used significantly greater F0 variation and fewer syllables per second. Previous research has found that American mothers tend to use higher pitch than do mothers from other cultures, but when maternal education was controlled in the current study, we did not find a significant difference in average pitch across our three populations. This is the first research systematically comparing spontaneous ID and adult-directed speech prosody between Western and traditional societies, and it is consistent with a large body of evidence showing similar acoustic patterns in ID speech across industrialized populations. © 2014 Copyright Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.