In this seventh edition of the Excellent MSc Dissertation series, four students present condensed versions of their Master’s theses, completed for the MSc degree in Media and Communication Studies at Lund University. Separately and together, the four contributions in this book exemplify what staff at the Department of Communication and Media consider to comprise an excellent dissertation at the Ma

Radical right populist parties have often been treated as “pariahs,” being excluded from coalition politics in parliamentary democracies. We argue that negative rhetoric targeted at radical right populist parties in legislative debates is used by the established parties to distance themselves from such parties and that the incentives to do so depend on the political context. Using sentiment analys

The Journal of Comparative Physiology A is the premier peer-reviewed scientific journal in comparative physiology, in particular sensory physiology, neurophysiology, and neuroethology. Founded in 1924 by Karl von Frisch and Alfred Kühn, it celebrates its 100th anniversary in 2024. During these 100 years, many of the landmark achievements in these disciplines were published in this journal. To comm

Adults can extract phonological regularities from just several minutes’ exposure to natural-istic input of an unknown spoken language (Gullberg et al., 2010). We examined whether such implicit statistical learning mechanisms also operate in the sign language modality. The input materials con-sisted of a continuous sign stream in the form of a weather forecast in Svenskt Teckenspråk (STS). L1-speak

Inverse stochastic resonance (ISR) is a counterintuitive phenomenon where noise reduces the oscillation frequency of an oscillator to a minimum occurring at an intermediate noise intensity, and sometimes even to the complete absence of oscillations. In neuroscience, ISR was first experimentally verified with cerebellar Purkinje neurons [Buchin et al., PLOS Comput. Biol. 12, e1005000 (2016)]. These

Natural and technological networks exhibit dynamics that can lead to complex cooperative behaviors, such as synchronization in coupled oscillators and rhythmic activity in neuronal networks. Understanding these collective dynamics is crucial for deciphering a range of phenomena from brain activity to power grid stability. Recent interest in co-evolutionary networks has highlighted the intricate in

Despite the increased use of different types of gender-fair forms in French, studies investigating their interpretation in context remain few. To fill this gap, we conducted a pre-registered study using a timed sentence evaluation task to examine speakers' possibilities to establish an anaphoric relationship between a gendered anaphoric expression (women or men) and non-stereotyped role nouns as a

In many democratic societies, research has identified an increase in animosity between supporters of different political parties. While this phenomenon has been extensively examined among the general public, less research has explored the role of political elites in contributing to partisan hostility. This study aims to fill this research gap by analyzing instances where members of parliament (MPs

Legislatures are a key institution in modern political systems. They control the executive: in parliamentary systems, they elect the government, and in presidential systems, they often approve the members of the cabinet who were appointed by the president. Moreover, legislatures and their committees are the main bodies in a political system in which new policies - in the form of law proposals - ar

This article discusses the potentials of a/r/tography aka artography against the background of life in an accelerating academia that is increasingly shallow and unfulfilling, and where quality is only indirectly measured using bibliometrics. We find Hartmut Rosa’s concept of resonance to be useful when discussing the values that get lost in such a system. We appreciate the arguments for a slower,

Background: Affectivity has been suggested as a complex adaptive meta-system composed of positive affect and negative affect, two independent but interrelated markers of well-being, that can be represented as four distinct affective profiles: self-fulfilling (high positive affect/low negative affect), high affective (high positive affect/high negative affect), low affective (low positive affect/lo

Misogynistic attitudes have surged in the past few years and the “manosphere” – an online milieu promoting toxic and rigid masculinity norms – is often seen as an arena for spreading such ideas. Within the manosphere, manfluencers (i.e., male influencers who espouse misogynistic content and beliefs) are known for trying to persuade men to view women and feminism as a threat to their masculinity an

Human physiology is the study of how organisms, organ systems, and individual organs function under normal circumstances. As a consequence of its paramount importance to medicine, physiology has been studied since ancient times, but the models studied in this book follow the tradition of modern physiology pioneered by Claude Bernard in the mid 1800s.The focus of the book lies on how dynamical mech

Scholarly literature has demonstrated that hybridity transforms both legacy and new media, but that this change is not even. We treat social media platforms as arenas of remediation, where users share and add their own context to information produced by both media subtypes and compare social media conversations about migration in six European languages that include links to either traditional or n

Speech and gestures express meaning together, connecting lexical and visuo-spatial representations in the speaker’s mind. Several studies have demonstrated uptake of spatial information from gestures however usually following explicit instructions to recreate or recall spatial features, deviating from typical listening situations. It remains unclear whether exposure to gestures activates spatial r

This paper presents a study where a 3D motion-capture animated ‘virtual speaker’ is compared to a video of a real speaker with regards to how it facilitates children's speech comprehension of narratives in background multitalker babble noise. As secondary measures, children self-assess the listening- and attentional effort demanded by the task, and associates words describing positive or negative

Educational software based on teachable agents has repeatedly proven to have positive effects on students’ learning outcomes. The strongest effects have been shown for low-performers. A number of mechanisms have been proposed to explore this outcome, in particular mechanisms that involve attributions of social agency to teachable agents. Our study examined whether an expression of high versus low