Welcome to MAd Lab

How do media and advertising influence us? Why do people pay more attention to some media than others? What are the pros and cons of media multitasking? When does immersing yourself in media lead to positive vs. negative consequences?
Located in Department of Advertising, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the Media and Advertising (MAd) Lab seeks to understand the psychology behind media and advertising effects- how media and advertising impact our cognitive processes, affect, and behavior. If you are interested in joining us, please get in touch.

People

Kevin Wise (Ph.D., Stanford University) is a Professor in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising at Illinois. His research explores the psychology underlying interactive media use. In other words, how do different attributes of medium, message, person, and situation influence the processes and outcomes of media use? He primarily addresses this question through experiments that measure physiological, behavioral, and self-report indicators of cognition, emotion, and motivation.

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Jennifer is currently a Ph.D. candidate at the Institute of Communications Research. She is primarily interested in using social media for strategic communication in the context of health, scientific, and environmental topics. Her research utilized methods mainly from quantitative traditions. Her doctoral dissertation investigates different visual strategies for combating health misinformation on social media. She collaborates with MAdLab members on several ongoing projects, including visual metaphors in advertising and ChatGPT literacy education.

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Wei Xiao is a Ph.D student in ICR. She is broadly interested in exploring alternative approaches to the reasoning behind sharing dis/misinformation to debunk dis/misinformation or inoculate people against misinformation. Her research also involves technology policy topics, such as data privacy, free expression, and AI governance. While fighting traditional disinformation, Wei is equally dedicated to addressing the potential ramifications inherent in AI-amplified disinformation scenarios. 

Prior to coming to the ICR, Wei received her MA in communication, culture, and technology from Georgetown University and BA in communication and economics from University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Ewa Masłowska (Ph.D., University of Amsterdam) is an Associate Professor in the Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising at Illinois. Ewa’s research centers around marketing communication and consumer behavior, specifically consumer-brand interactions in the context of new technologies. Her current research and teaching interests include personalized advertising, brand engagement, social media advertising, eWOM, consumer decision making, digital analytics and computational advertising.

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Mohit Gupta is a Ph.D. student in Informatics. His computational psycholinguistics research focuses on understanding how people read, how words influence their thoughts and emotions, and how reading alters the brain through eye-tracking. His qualitative findings are used to incorporate human behavior into Natural Language Computational Algorithms (like Large Language Models) that analyze human-generated text data.

Yanbo Li is a doctoral student at the Institute of Communications Research. His research interests lie at the intersection of computational communication and political communication. Specifically, he is interested in using computational methods to learn about online misinformation and incivility contagion inside and between different countries and the possible factors that foster these processes.

Veranika Paltaratskaya (M.S., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Communications Research and the MAdLab manager. Veranika’s master’s thesis focused on the topic of time perception during media use. Her current research focuses on time perception, message fatigue, and computational approaches to communications research. Veranika completed her bachelor's degree in neuroscience and art history at Emory University, and her master's in advertising at UIUC.

Student Profile

Minhey is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. Her research centers on mass communication, with an emphasis on persuasion and health communication. She is interested in message processing and the effects of media messages on physical and mental health. Her research delves into how the digital media landscape and individual vulnerabilities further complicate these effects, addressing topics such as the creation and dissemination of health misinformation, unhealthy gratifications sought from social media, and the vicious cycle of body image disturbance due to algorithms.

Rachel is a second-year Master’s student in Advertising at the College of Media at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, advised by Dr. Kevin Wise. She graduated with a BA in Advertising from Zhejiang University in 2023.

Alice Ji is a Ph.D. student at the Institute of Communications Research. She completed her dual B.A. in Economics and Psychology at the University of Chicago. Her current research centers on the psychology of persuasion in digital media, with a particular focus on social media platforms. I investigate how consumers interpret and react to persuasive messages such as advertisements and health-related messages by brands and social media influencers.

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CV

Melodie is a doctoral student at the Institute of Communications Research, primarily researching the social and psychological effects of media messages and digital media use. Her specific interests revolve around the interactions between interactive media technologies and individuals' identity, perceptions of "otherness," and social relationships, as well as their role in driving social mobilization or polarization. 

Past Members

Giang Pham was a Ph.D. candidate whose research focuses on psychological factors that drive user engagement with media. She received an M.S. in Advertising from University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and a B.A. in Advertising and Public Relations from Hallym University in South Korea. Her dissertation examines the experience of flow in media use and its potential costs on the user’s goal performance and gratification.

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LinkedIn

Jacob (Ph.D -Communication, UC Santa Barbara) was an assistant professor in the Department of Advertising in the College of Media at UIUC and is an affiliate of the Illinois Informatics Program. His research lies at the intersection of cognitive neuroscience and media psychology, using brain imaging, behavioral, and digital trace data to investigate how digital media influence how we direct our attention and pursue our goals.

Personal Website

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Twitter

GitHub

Xiaohan (Catherine) Hu was a Ph.D. candidate in Charles H. Sandage Department of Advertising at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. She earned her M.S. in Advertising at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and B.A. in Advertising at Wuhan University in Wuhan, China. Her research centers on the question: What psychological mechanisms are associated with information processing on digital media? More specifically, her research focuses on the role of people’s perception of controlin explaining digital advertising effectiveness.

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ResearchGate

Chen Chen (Crystal) was a Ph.D. student with interests focusing on how an immersive environment modulates individuals’ information processing and consequently influences their cognitive performance and decision making. It turns into three interrelated areas: 1) Identifying the underlying mechanisms of an immersive experience; 2) Understanding these mechanisms’ cognitive and persuasion outcomes; 3) Exploring how the characteristics of the immersive environment modify these processes.

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ResearchGate

Anna is a Phd student (2021 cohort) in the Institute of Communications Research. She got her Master in Social Science degree from the Chinese University of Hong Kong, majoring in advertising. Before that, she got her BA in communication from Renmin University of China. Prior to joining ICR, Anna was a Senior Research Manager in a marketing research company, Ipsos (China) Co. Ltd. Her research interest is exploring how social-psychological factors influence people’s cognitive, attitudinal and behavioral responses to information in the digital environment, specifically, the influence of social ties and position in social network structure.

Yilin (Coco) Ren was a Ph.D. candidate in Communication and Media with a focus on Media Psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Duringher Ph.D., she also pursued an M.S. in Applied Statistics. Her research focuses on how human-device interactions affect the psychological processing of media content.

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Ethan was an undergraduate student majoring in computer science and advertising. He uses computational methods, including NLP and data science, for research in media psychology. He is currently  investigating how algorithms affect how we receive and process news.

GitHub

LinkedIn

Research Website

Recent Research

Upcoming

Wise, K., Paltaratskaya, V., & Ji, A. (2026). Media choice. In De Gruyter Handbook of Media Psychology. Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG.

2025

Paltaratskaya, V., Ji, A., Mazumdar, P., & Wise, K. (2025). Beyond Buzzwords: The Development of Large Language Models and Their Use in Advertising and Strategic Communication Research. Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 1–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.2025.2498996 [download]

Ji, A., Paltaratskaya, V., & Wise, K. (2025, June). The Effect of Message Fatigue on Visual Attention to, and Elaboration of Mental Health Infographics. Annual Conference of the International Communication Association (ICA 2025), Colorado, US.

2024

Wise, K., Willis, E., Ji, A., Paltaratskaya, V., Chung, M. (2024, November). Psychological Processing of Important Safety Information (ISI) in Social Media Pharmaceutical Advertising. NCA 110th Annual Convention, Louisiana, US. [download]

Hu, X., & Wise, K. (2024). Disentangling Control and Personalization: Exploring the Effects of Ad Choice and Ad Personalization in Digital Advertising Effectiveness. Journal of Interactive Advertising, 1-24. [download]

Franks, J. U., Malthouse, E. C., & Maslowska, E. (2024). Advertising: A Friend, a Foe, or a Frenemy in Building Healthy Media-Audience Relationships. In Advances in Advertising Research XIV: Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger: Advertising and Communication between Immediacy and Sustainability (pp. 71-89). Wiesbaden: Springer Fachmedien Wiesbaden. [download]

Gupta, M., Kazybayeva, A., Paltaratskaya, V., Zhang, J., Peterson, M. & Wise K. Visual Attention, Comprehension, and Memory for Visual Metaphors in Advertising. 107th Annual Conference of the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication (AEJMC). Philadelphia, USA, 2024. [download]

2023

Kim, E., Wise, K., Erdelez, S., & Chiang, Y. H. (2023). Development of a scale for measuring individual propensity for serendipitous information encounters in an online environment. Journal of Information Science, 01655515221141041. [download]

Meijers, M. H., Torfadóttir, R. H., Wonneberger, A., & Maslowska, E. (2023). Experiencing climate change virtually: The effects of virtual reality on climate change related cognitions, emotions, and behavior. Environmental Communication, 17(6), 581-601. [download]

Paltaratskaya, V., Wise, K. Time perception, cognitive load, and memory for short form video applications (SVAs). 73rd Annual Conference of the International Communication Association. Toronto, Canada, 2023. [download]

 

 

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