The Metropolitan Life Insurance Company’s Health Heroes series was a marketing effort comprised of published narratives in booklet form. One such publication, Health Heroes: Edward Jenner, told the story of Jenner’s…
In addition to documenting travel adventures and extending holiday greetings to friends and family, postcards can also function as health communication. This investigation turns to a unique type…
Vintage golf postcards are an underexplored resource for an increased understanding of visual-historical sport communication. This rhetorical analysis of a collection of vintage golf postcards reveals insight into…
Josh Compton, Professor of Speech, has been awarded the 2022 Distinguished Book Award from the Communication and Social Cognition Division of the National Communication Association for his book, Persuasion…
I’ve always had a complicated relationship with my voice. I’m a stutterer, and I’m a speech professor.
Much of my stutter is covert, from over forty years’ practice of creative ways to avoid blocks and elongations and repetitions. I glide into a quick word substitution, or I linger for a second or two of strategic silence. And as a result, I usually pass as fluent—so well, even, that I won scores of awards for public speaking and debate in college. And now I’m regularly invited to give talks about my research for academic and community events. I teach a popular public speaking course with a wait list that regularly doubles and triples the number of available seats in my class. My stutter is not obvious to most people. I sound pretty fluent, usually.
But Dysfluent—an independent magazine supported by the Irish Stammering Association and the British Stammering Association / STAMMA and created by Conor Foran and Bart Rzeznik—challenges the idea that passing as fluent is the only worthy metric for a good voice. I see this magazine as a sort of celebration of stammering, of stuttering as a different way of communicating. Its essays and interviews give space to the stuttering voice—and more than just space. A platform and a spotlight and applause.
Josh Compton is Professor of Speech at Dartmouth College. He has been studying inoculation as a way to confer resistance to influence for more than 20 years.
This study investigated whether freedom-threat and psychological reactance could be dampened when ever-vapers (i.e., people who have tried vaping) are inoculated with a forewarning of an impending exposure…
The aim of this study is to determine if a broad-based inoculation message strategy will undermine thepersuasive influence of conspiracy theories. In this experiment, we (1) investigate individual…
Digital environmental information presented with low web accessibility reduces participation in environmental advocacy and information seeking behaviors for many people with disabilities, creating a consequential digital divide. We…
In response to the International Communication Association’s 2022 theme, “One World, One Network,” we argue that one way to expand the notion of ‘One World’ and to signal…
Josh Compton, Professor of Speech and covert stutterer, has been thinking about voice all his life, from his childhood struggles with fluency to his recent research on public speaking…
Conspiracy theories pose a variety of social and psychological consequences for individuals and society, and research suggests that around half of the U.S. population believes at least one….
The World Clown Association (WCA) released a press kit in anticipation of potential negative effects on the image of clowns from the release of a film version of…
In recent years, many kinds of interventions have been developed that seek to reduce susceptibility to misinformation. In two preregistered longitudinal studies (N1 = 503, N2 = 673), we leverage two previously validated…
Inoculation theory is a theory of resistance to influence that builds on analogous relationships with medical vaccination. In short: Exposure to weakened forms of challenges motivates resistance to…