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What effect does the communication of politicians on Twitter have? Is it reinforcing existent ideologies because users get messages of politicians mostly from their own ideological cluster? Or is Twitter exposing the users to cross ideological content as well? We argue that both is the case. We show that politicians use the different communication channels. Twitter provides to distinguish between communication within their own ideological cluster in order to organize support and across these clusters to argue against their opponents. Considering German general elections as a case study, we present empirical tests that politicians—more than other politically interested users—use Twitter mostly to provide information but with significant differences between parties. We furthermore show that politicians use the whole spectrum of communication channels provided by Twitter. Finally, there is an empirical evidence of different qualities of the communicated content: measured by sentiment analysis the communication with members of the same party is less harsh than the communication with political rivals. This particular usage of communication on Twitter might lead to stronger polarization in political discourses.

Research on bad news delivery reveals a reliable temporal delay in the onset of the bad news message from the sender to the receiver. Two experiments utilized a false feedback test design to determine whether the delay is better accounted for by negative verbal message planning, politeness, or both. Both studies ( Ns = 135 and 138) featured participant-senders who delivered either scripted or unscripted good, neutral, or bad news to a stranger. News valence, delay before response, and reluctance were measured. Both experiments supported the functional politeness explanation. Study 2 also supported the negative verbal message–planning explanation. Implications and limitations are discussed.

A situational theory of the behavior of organizational publics is expanded conceptually to explain the occurrence of cognitive, attitudinal, and behavioral effects of communication behavior as well as the occurrence of communication behavior itself. The expanded theory explains when publics in an organization's environment will become active and interpenetrate the organization. The theory also provides a situational, teleological explanation of the attitude-behavior relationship. In this study, the theory is used to identify publics that arise from corporate "public affairs" issues. Publics are found that are consistent with those found in other studies of publics.

Humans adapt their communication style when interacting with one another. With interactive technologies such as voice assistants taking over the role of an interaction partner, the question arises whether and to what extent humans also adapt to their communication style. The adaptation could have a grounding function, ensuring efficient communication with the current interaction partner, or be based on priming which could endure and influence subsequent interactions. In a pre-registered experimental lab study, 133 participants interacted with a voice assistant whose communication style varied regarding politeness (polite vs. non-polite) and machine-likeness (machine-like vs. natural). Participants' verbal behavior during and in a subsequent communication situation was analyzed. Politeness as well as machine-likeness adaptation was observed during the interaction but not afterwards, supporting the grounding hypothesis. Furthermore, the adaptation process appears to be unconscious as the voice assistant's different communication styles did not affect conscious evaluations.

1 Ontogeny of Social Behavior -- 2 On the Physiological Organization of Social Behavior: Sex and Aggression -- 3 The Analysis of Animal Communication -- 4 Mechanisms and Evolution of Spacing in Animals -- 5 Foraging Strategies and Their Social Significance -- 6 The Evolution of Mating Systems in Birds and Mammals -- 7 The Roles of Individual, Kin, and Group Selection in the Evolution of Sociality.