UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — Faculty members, graduate students and alumni from the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications shared expert insights and received multiple awards at the annual Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC) Conference, held Aug. 4-8 in New Orleans.
The Bellisario College has long maintained a strong presence within AEJMC, earning recognition for its scholarship while contributing to the organization's leadership, committees and events. This year, 36 members of the Bellisario College — 15 faculty members and 21 graduate students — as well as numerous alumni took part in presentations, panels and other activities throughout the conference. Once again, the college showcased its expertise across research areas including advocacy, artificial intelligence, ethics, crisis communication and environmental communication.
Homero Gil de Zúñiga, distinguished professor of media effects and AI, had seven papers accepted to the AEJMC conference. Two received top paper awards. They were "Can AI govern? AI news use, political efficacy and support for AI as a substitute for human governance,” which received the top paper award from the Political Communication Division, and “Can AI heuristics lead to news elaboration? A serial mediation model from AI news use to perceived and actual political knowledge,” which received the top paper award from the Communication Technology Division. Gil de Zúñiga also participated in the Paul J. Deutschmann Award Panel, which is organized by the Elected Standing Committee on Research.
Yujin Heo, assistant professor of advertising/public relations; Yanan Wu, a doctoral student; Fuyuan Shen, Donald P. Bellisario Professor of Advertising; and Heather Shoenberger, associate professor of advertising/public relations, received the top paper award from AEJMC’s Communication Technology Division for their study “AI as a source cue in fact-checking: The role of process explanation in shaping explainability, credibility and belief.” The lead author, Bingbing Zhang, is a Bellisario College doctoral degree alumna and assistant professor at the University of Iowa.
Holly Overton, professor of advertising/public relations, serves as the chair of the AEJMC Elected Standing Committee on Professional Freedom and Responsibility/Member of AEJMC Board of Directors. She also had two accepted papers authored with Bellisario College graduate students and alumni, including “Examining information processing and advocacy intentions among CSA supporters and opponents” and “Betting on gains: Message framing and disclaimers in sports gambling advertising.”
Overton also co-leads the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication’s cross-institutional student lab collaboration with the University of Georgia’s Crisis Communication Think Tank. Students from Penn State and the University of Georgia presented their current and upcoming projects during AEJMC’s preconference day on Aug. 4.
Overton is the research director for the Page Center, which is part of the Bellisario College. Each year, the Center sponsors a panel during the afternoon of AEJMC’s preconference day. This year’s session, which was led by Virginia Harrison, assistant professor of advertising/public relations, was titled “Prosocial communication, leadership and grassroots campaigns: The role of public relations in community mobilization.” The panel discussion was based on research shared in an annual insights report published by the Page Center last year. The Page Center also hosted a reception for all its scholars the evening of the preconference.
Hunter Overton, assistant teaching professor, and Lee Ahern, associate professor of advertising/public relations, participated in a teaching panel discussion titled “Seeing patterns: Teaching data analytics and AI-driven visualization in mass communication.”
Interim associate dean of the Bellisario College Juliet Pinto and Wu presented “Factors influencing perceived climate-related action: The roles of personal narratives and mobilization information in solutions-based climate local news.” Zhang is the lead author on the project. Pinto also spoke at a workshop organized by the Fellows for the Empowerment of Early Career Women in Communication Education.
Patrick Plaisance, the Don W. Davis Professor in Ethics, had three studies accepted to the conference. His study “Moral judgment, virtue and digital flourishing: Directions for media ethics” received third place in the top faculty paper competition in AEJMC’s Media Ethics Division.
Also accepted were papers “From coverage to control: A case study of Sinclair ‘must-run’ election content,” which Plaisance co-authored with Bellisario College alumna Lana Medina and doctoral student Jing Xu, and “Recent refinements in moral psychology approaches and their implications for media ethics scholarship.”
Michael Schmierbach, professor of media studies, was a panelist on “Publishing in books and academic journals,” a session that was part of the Routledge/Taylor and Francis and AEJMC Elected Standing Committee on Publications. The session focused on the evolving landscape of academic publishing. Moderating the panel was Alyssa Appelman, the chair of AEJMC Publications Committee and a Bellisario College alumna.
Shoenberger served as a panelist for a session on “Teaching advertising in the age of social media, generative AI, and corporate apocalypse.” She was also a discussant in the sessions: “The future of storytelling and strategic communication: Industry perspectives on AI, audience engagement and media ecosystems” and “Consumer responses to AI-generated advertising and AI agents.”
S. Shyam Sundar, Evan Pugh University Professor and James P. Jimirro Professor of Media Effects at Penn State, along with graduate students from his lab group, had five papers accepted to the conference, including “Can we use AI to create stimuli for experiments? A comparison of human vs. LLM-generated message frames,” which received a top-3 paper award from the Communication Theory and Methodology Division. Co-authors on that study were doctoral students Peixin Hua, Temilade Adeeko, Jack Weier and Rehab Alayoubi.
Sundar was also an invited speaker on the Paul J. Deutschmann Award panel session.
Graduate student work
Hua received third place for top graduate and undergraduate student research paper from the AEJMC’s Advertising Division for the paper titled “The effects of humor and anthropomorphism on virtual influencer perceptions and consumer behavior.” Co-authors on that study were Adeeko, Wu and Alayoubi.
Hua also gave a live demonstration for this year’s CSGE Graduate Teaching Showcase at the conference.
Doctoral student Hannah Xiangruo Huang presented her paper “Gendered accommodation cognitive-behavioral loop model: Explore the bidirectional impact of sexist communication accommodation in video games” during a scholar-to-scholar poster session. The poster presentation was part of the Commission on the Status of Women.
Doctoral student Yuxuan Jin presented two papers at the conference. They were “It’s not what you say, it’s who says it: In-party elite advantages in debunking misinformation,” which was presented during a poster session for AEJMC’s Political Communication Division and co-authored with doctoral student Eunchae Jang, Gil de Zúñiga and Emily Vraga, a faculty member at the University of Minnesota.
The other, “Can AI heuristics lead to news elaboration? A serial mediation model from AI news use to perceived and actual political knowledge,” received top research paper recognition from the Communication Technology Division.
Doctoral student Jess Nickerson presented "Fan identification, authenticity and parasocial interaction — A mediation model of well-being in college athlete NIL endorsements on Instagram," in a poster session. She also moderated a panel titled, "Ethics and critical questions in sports journalism" for AEJMC’s Sports Interest Group.
Sydney Forde, a Bellisario College alumna and now a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Pennsylvania, won the AEJMC Cultural & Critical Studies Division Dissertation Award for her Penn State dissertation, which she defended in 2025.
Next year's conference will be held Aug. 8-12, 2027, in Chicago.
AEJMC is a nonprofit organization of more than 3,700 educators, students and practitioners from around the globe. Founded in 1912 by Willard Grosvenor Bleyer, the first president (1912-13) of the American Association of Teachers of Journalism, as it was then known, AEJMC is the oldest and largest alliance of journalism and mass communication educators and administrators at the college level.