The predictability of international terrorism: A time‐series analysis

Abstract The study examines the predictability of international terrorism in terms of the existence of trends, seasonality, and periodicity of terrorist events. The data base used was the RAND Corporation's Chronology of International Terrorism. It contains the attributes of every case of international terrorism from 1968 to 1986 (n = 5,589). The authors applied Box‐Jenkins models for a time‐series analysis of the occurrence of terrorist events as well as their victimization rates. The analysis revealed that occurrence of terrorist events is far from being random: There is a clear trend and an almost constant periodicity of one month that can be best described by a first‐order moving averag…

Multiple effects of visual format on TV news learning

Two experiments were conducted on edited TV newscast sequences to clarify effects of film accompaniment on learning from heard news text. In Experiment 1,150 British subjects viewed a sequence with either film format throughout or alternating film and ‘talking head’ format between items. Those items that were presented by ‘talking heads’ in the mixed sequence were learned better with film format, in which the heard text was accompanied by appropriate moving pictures. However, no effect of uniform context was found on the remaining items. In Experiment 2, 91 German subjects viewed one of four versions of a bulletin, one with ‘talking head’, one with film throughout, the other two having comp…

IS THERE A TWO-STEP FLOW OF AGENDA-SETTING?

Predictions of the public agenda from television coverage

This study develops a methodology to show how German TV news in 1986 could be used to predict time trends in the public agenda for energy supply, health care, and other topics. A major influence in that year was the Chernobyl accident in the former Soviet Union. The direct result was an increase in agenda concern for energy supply. The findings showed how coverage of that incident and other issues exerted a combined influence on the public agenda.

Exploring the social and sexual “reality” of contemporary pornography

What are the social roles assumed by men and women in contemporary sexually explicit movies, and in what contexts are their actions portrayed? Perhaps more important, have the predominant themes of pornography shifted in response to the public scrutiny and criticism popular in the mid‐1980s? In this investigation we addressed these questions using a random sample of 50 pornographic videotapes drawn from an archive of essentially all such materials targeted for heterosexual consumers available in the international marketplace from 1979 to 1988. The findings revealed that some thematic aspects of modern pornographic movies have shifted over time. Significant increases were evident in the freq…

Change the contect and enhance the understanding. Memory in everyday life. Graham M. Davies and Robert H. Logie (Eds). North Holland, Amsterdam, 1993. No of pages xiii + 554. ISBN 0 444 889997 3. Price US $168.50

Personality and movie preferences: A comparison of American and German audiences

Abstract The impact of personality type (extraversion, neuroticism, psychoticism) and culture (American, German) on preferences for contemporary movies was explored. Consistent with theoretical expectations, the findings revealed that movie preferences were mediated by both the psychoticism and extraversion personality types and by an interaction between psychoticism by culture.