Assistant Professor Teresa Lynch, PhD student Matthew Erxleben and external collaborator Gregory Perreault’s piece, “Threat and enhancement: Strength of gamer identity moderates affective response to messages about gaming,” was published in the Journal of Media Psychology on May 16.

The authors investigated the influence of gamer identity affiliation on affective responses to identity threats and enhancements, advancing hypotheses derived from social identity theory. Analyses of participants’ emotional reactions to messages that either devalued (i.e. threatened) or elevated (i.e. enhanced) the status of gamers when associating them with a mass shooting event revealed that individuals with stronger gamer identity affiliation reported relatively more homogeneous emotions relative to individuals less affiliated with gamer identity. The authors discussed these response patterns with respect to how emotions may shape intergroup interaction in online communication.