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Professor seeks UM School of Journalism and New Media student volunteers for app project that provides free emotional support

Posted on: January 18th, 2021 by ldrucker

As we continue to be separated from each other due to COVID-19, several studies have documented increased levels of depression, stress and anxiety, and decreased levels of general mental well-being among students.

A University of Mississippi School of Journalism and New Media professor is hoping to change that by partnering with creators of an app that provides free emotional support. Professor Graham Bodie, Ph.D., is also seeking students from the school willing to participate as listeners through the app for other students in need.

Graham Bodie

The HearMe.App, created by Adam Lippin and his team,

allows people to seek and receive support at any time. Users download the app to their Android or Apple device, specify their preferred listener type (male-female, age range, time availability to chat, etc.), and either identify a topic for conversation or begin chatting.

“All conversations are text-based, and listeners go through minimal training in active and reflective listening before they are allowed to interact with users,” Bodie said. “To date, over 54,000 conversations have taken place on the app with 94 percent of support seekers reporting they ‘felt better after one chat.’”

At the outset of the pandemic, the HearMe.App team commissioned a survey of 350 American adults, Bodie said. Results indicated that a majority of 18- to 24-year-olds reported feeling less connected than before the pandemic, compared to a majority of those over 35 who reported feeling more connected.

“Those in the traditional college-aged cohort were the least satisfied with the emotional support they are currently receiving and more readily identified texting to be a viable means of seeking support (again, compared to those in older age cohorts),” Bodie said. “Our current studies thus target a key demographic likely to benefit the most from digital forms of emotional support.”

The studies will take place at the University of Mississippi and University of Minnesota. They will examine whether broad-based, communal emotional support, delivered through a free app, can mitigate stress among college students and the negative mental health effects of social isolation and loneliness resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic.

By any number of measures, 2020 was stressful, and 2021 might be best described as “the year of loneliness” if we continue to be separated from each other due to COVID, Bodie said.

“In March, U.S. American higher education institutions closed down most campus operations and dormitory housing, and began encouraging or mandating online courses in an effort to manage the rapidly spreading COVID-19 pandemic,” he said. “By April, it was clear students were unlikely to return to campus for the remainder of the spring semester. As summer turned to fall, students continued to remain isolated, either at home or in a restricted and curfewed campus community.”

Bodie said general population studies find younger age groups reporting more impact from COVID-19 than older age groups, and students from disenfranchised groups are even more at risk of suffering from the consequences of the pandemic.

“Although most colleges and universities offer formal sources of support, these resources are generally underutilized,” he said.

Even if universities were able to convince more students to use mental health services, Bodie said the staffing alone would overwhelm personnel and overextend the financial capacities of higher education budgets. One answer to assisting students through crises is to strengthen social support networks.

Receiving high-quality support from friends and other informal help providers is vital for student coping, he said. However, COVID-19 precautions have disrupted students’ channels of seeking support. Some students are now socially isolated from peers, roommates, family members, and co-workers; and their social life has declined since March 2020.

Bodie said scholars are increasingly recognizing the need for colleges and universities to prioritize early prevention and intervention programming through platforms that allow students to adequately manage their mental health on or off campus.

He is looking for students to become listeners. While some might only be available for one session each week, others may have a few hours weekly to devote to the project.

“First, it does not take long to be a supportive shoulder for people, a keen ear available to listen in times of stress,” Bodie said. “Second, we hope students will seek support through the application as the semester progresses, whether they sign up as a listener or not.”

If you are interested in participating as a listener, click this link to answer the following short survey to get started.

Volunteer to “listen” on the app by emailing Bodie at at gbodie@olemiss.edu.

For more information about our journalism or integrated marketing communications programs visit jnm.olemiss.edu or email jour-imc@olemiss.edu.

UM integrated marketing communication professor wins Outstanding Scholar in Communication Theory Award

Posted on: May 9th, 2019 by ldrucker

The Southern States Communication Association (SSCA) awarded the Outstanding Scholar in Communication Theory Award to University of Mississippi integrated marketing communication professor Graham Bodie, Ph.D., at their convention in Montgomery, Alabama April 5.

“Dr. Bodie’s extensive history of exceptionally high quality scholarship on interpersonal communication, specifically that focusing on the affective, cognitive, and behavioral processes people engage in when attending to others and listening during interaction makes him a worthy recipient of the award,” said Michael Kotowski, chair of the Communication Theory Division within SSCA.

The Outstanding Scholar in Communication Theory Award is given each year to a communication scholar who, in the opinion of the Communication Theory Division leadership, has made a major contribution to the study and advancement of communication theory.

Recipients of this award exhibit a highly productive and exceptional research program that advances the fundamental and theoretical knowledge of basic processes of human communication.

“I am so honored to accept this award, to be recognized among colleagues I admire so deeply,” said Bodie. “When you publish something, you hope that others read it and that it has an impact. Awards like this help you know you’re doing something right.”

In addition to his work at the university, Bodie also serves as Chief Listening Officer at Listen First Project, an organization that encourages conversations that prioritize understanding to bridge divides and mend our frayed social fabric.

“Listening is so fundamental to everything we do as humans, whether in our close, personal relationships or in our more transactional exchanges,” said Bodie. “What shocked me when I entered graduate school was how little we actually know about this important life skill. So, I set out to change that.”

Bodie has changed the field of listening and is recognized as one of the most prolific scholars of communication. He has published over 90 monographs, book chapters, and encyclopedia entries, many of which are considered essential readings in classrooms around the country.

In his most recent project, funded by the National Science Foundation, Bodie aims to study what types of listener behaviors help people continue to express their thoughts and feelings during a stressful interaction.

As a recipient of this award, Bodie will have the opportunity to deliver a spotlight presentation on his program of research that lead him to receive this award at the 2020 Southern States Communication Association Convention in Frisco, Texas.

SSCA’s purpose is to promote the study, criticism, research, teaching, and application of the artistic, humanistic, and scientific principles of communication. SSCA, a not-for-profit organization, exists for educational, scientific, and literary purposes only.

School of Journalism and New Media professor uses NSF grant to study interpersonal communications

Posted on: July 31st, 2018 by ldrucker

School of Journalism and New Media professor Graham Bodie believes that if people can feel that they’re being heard during times of stress, their lives will improve. With that in mind, he is working to find the best way to teach critical listening skills that could enhance lives.

A professor of integrated marketing communications at the University of Mississippi, Bodie is conducting his research through a three year-grant from the National Science Foundation.

UM received the grant from the NSF’s Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences as part of a collaborative effort to study what happens during conversations about everyday problems. Penn State University and the University of Minnesota also were awarded grants in support of the collaboration, which seeks to clarify how discussing everyday stressors with others conveys support and leads to different emotional outcomes.

Bodie’s work will look at how a listener’s supportive comments influence the way a person talks about their stressful experience.

“My academic background is in how humans process information and how they behave as listeners, particularly within the context of talking about stressful events,” Bodie said. “What do we say that allows others to better understand their unique stressors and ultimately to cope with those events?

“How should we best train people in this capacity? What can listening to others teach us about ourselves, our society and our world?”

Bodie previously conducted research on listening and the social cognitive foundation of human communicative behavior. This project will expand on the nuances of what people do when they offer support to others, a facet that he said has not been thoroughly explored.

“Although there is work on specific features of supportive messages, it tends to be hypothetical, asking participants to imagine they receive support,” Bodie said. “Likewise, although there is work that pairs people together to talk through stressful events, most of this work explores general impressions of the conversation – how supported they felt after the conversation.”

This grant will allow Bodie to work with data from four previous studies, which includes more than 450 videotaped conversations of a person describing a stressor to another, while the listener provides support.

The research conducted with this grant fits in with the university’s Community Wellbeing Flagship Constellation research initiative, where researchers identify factors that impair the well-being of individuals and work to implement programs to build stronger, more vibrant communities.

“Dr. Bodie and his team’s recent National Science Foundation grant award demonstrates the opportunities we have to increase knowledge and improve practice and policy through cutting-edge research,” said John Green, constellation team leader and director of the UM Center for Population Studies. “As an active part of the Community Wellbeing Flagship Constellation and a committed member of the steering committee, Dr. Bodie is contributing to the University of Mississippi’s leadership in scholarly endeavors that will improve people’s lives.”

The research will examine how variations in these particular types of interactions result in differences in how the distressed person continues to express their thoughts and feelings throughout the interaction.

“What is missing is an understanding of how messages unfold over the course of a conversation to regulate the emotions of a person in distress,” said Denise Solomon, principal investigator and professor of communication arts and sciences at Penn State. “Our project will focus on studying the conversation linkages between one person’s supportive messages and the other person’s cognitive and emotional responses in an effort to map those dynamic patterns.”

The investigators will analyze every element of these conversations and develop strategies to show how emotion and cognitive processing are affected during the course of an interaction. The researchers have predicted that distressed individuals who are responsive to high-quality supportive messages during an interaction leave the conversation with an improved emotional state and a new understanding of their issue.

“The main prediction is the interaction between support quality and how disclosers talk about their event,” Bodie said. “I feel like if people can feel heard in times of stress, their lives will improve, and I want to know how we can best teach these skills toward bettering our lives.”

The researchers hope their findings will ultimately be able to assist support providers and counselors, while also leading to additional research to determine why some individuals or relationships show different levels of responsiveness during supportive conversations.

“The novelty in this research is mapping responsiveness within interactions onto important conversational outcomes, which opens the door to new questions about why those patterns differ between people and between relationships,” Solomon said.

“We also envision that the tool kit we develop can be used to illuminate the dynamics of other types of consequential conversations, such as in conflict negotiations or attempts to influence a partner’s health behavior.”

Other investigators on the project include Susanne Jones, associate professor of communication studies at the University of Minnesota, and Nilam Ram, professor of human development, family studies and psychology at Penn State.

Funding for this research was provided through grant no. 1749474 from the NSF Division of Behavioral and Cognitive Sciences.

This story was written by Christina Steube for Ole Miss News.