Barbara Maleckar 

Research Student 

Humanities and Social Sciences 

Email:

Barbara.Maleckar@winchester.ac.uk 

Address:

Biography

2003 - 2009: MSc, University of Ljubljana, Slovenia
2007 - 2008: research for MSc at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, as part of an Erasmus study exchange

During my psychology studies at the University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, I worked as a journalist for daily news and psychological magazines and collaborated in an observational study of audience response for Slovenian national television. I began to investigate the persuasive power of factual and fictional stories in the media for my Master’s dissertation, which I completed during a semester at the Johannes Kepler Universität in Linz, Austria. For my PhD in Winchester I am continuing this line of research, broadening it to the investigation of one of the mechanisms of narrative persuasion, engagement with story characters.

Publications

Conference Presentations

Maleckar, B., Giles, D., & Zawisza, M. (2011). Cognitive and emotional components of readers' engagement with story characters. Paper presented at the 7th  Conference of the Media Psychology Division of the German Psychological Society in Bremen, Germany, 10-12 August.

Appel, M., & Maleckar, B. (2010). The role of emotional and cognitive needs in the choice, experience, and influence of narratives. Paper presented at the 12th bienal conference of the International Society for the Empirical Research on Literature (IGEL) in Utrecht, Netherlands, 7-11 July.

Appel, M. & Malečkar, B. (2009, April). Persuasive effects of non-fictional, fictional, and lie stories: A closer look at individual differences in the need of affect and the need for cognition. Paper presented at the workshop Narrative Fact and Fiction: patterns of narrative construction in media stories and differential effects hosted by the ECREA Section of Audience and Reception Studies at the University of Vienna, Austria.

Malečkar, B. & Appel, M. (2008, July). The impact of information validity and need for affect on the persuasion through fiction. Paper presented at the XXIX International Congress of Psychology in Berlin, Germany.

Research Interests

Media framing: framing of domestic violence; use of news sources as characters in a news story; narrative techniques as devices of media framing; influence of celebrity status on character portrayal; framing effects as instances of narrative persuasion.

Narrative persuasion: structure and processes of readers’ engagement with characters; engagement with characters as a mechanism of narrative persuasion; influence of similarity and parasocial relationships on engagement with characters.