Jacob T. Fisher

Dr. Jacob T. Fisher (Ph.D., University of California, Santa Barbara) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication. His research is positioned at the intersection of digital technology, attention, and decision making. His current work in this area uses functional neuroimaging, behavioral and "big data" measures, and computational modeling to explore how effort requirements, perceptual complexity, and motivational factors in digital contexts influence attention and goal pursuit. He also conducts research in the domain of moral messaging, seeking to understand how morally-charged messages uniquely motivate attention and action at the individual and societal level. 

Dr. Fisher's work has been published in Nature Human Behaviour, Journal of Communcation, Network Neuroscience, Media Psychology, and a number of other outlets. He is the current research chair for the Communication and Social Cognition division of the National Communication Association, and is an active member of the Communication Science and Biology Interest Group and the Computational Methods Division of the International Communication Association.

Selected Recent Publications

Hopp, F.R., Amir, O., Fisher, J.T., Grafton, S., Sinnott-Armstrong, W., & Weber, R. (2023). Moral foundations elicit shared and dissociable cortical activation modulated by political ideology. Nature Human Behaviour.

Fisher, J.T., Hopp, F.R., & Weber (2023). Cognitive and perceptual load have opposing effects on brain network effciency and behavioral variability in ADHD. Network Neuroscience.

Fisher, J.T., Hopp, F.R., Chen, Y., & Weber, R. (2023). Uncovering the structure of media multitasking and attention problems with network analytic techniques. Computers in Human Behavior. 

Dale, K.R., Fisher, J.T., Liao, J., Grinberg, E. (2023). The shape of inspiration: Exploring the narrative story trajectories and self-transcendent elicitors within inspirational movies. Media Psychology. 

Fisher, J.T., Hopp, F.R., & Weber, R. (2023). Mapping attention across multiple media tasks. Media Psychology. 

Parry, D.A., Fisher, J.T., Mieczkowski, H., Sewall, C.J.R., & Davidson, B. (2022). Social media and well-being: A methodological perspective. Current Opinion in Psychology. (45). 101825.

Fisher, J.T., & Hamilton, K. (2021) Integrating media selection and media effects using decision theory. Journal of Media Psychology. 33(4), 215-225.

Parry, D.A., Davidson, B., Sewall, C.J.R., Fisher, J.T., Mieczkowski, H., Quintana, D. (2021). Measurement discrepancies between logged and self-reported digital media use: A systematic review and meta-analysis. Nature Human Behaviour. 5, 1535-1547.

Fisher, J.T., Hopp, F.R., Weber, R. (2021). Network neuroscience: a practical introduction for communication researchers. Communication Methods & Measures. 15, 60-71.

Hopp, F.R., Fisher, J.T., & Weber, R. (2020). A graph-learning approach for detecting moral conflicts in movie scripts. Media & Communication. 8(3), 164-179.

Hopp, F.R., Fisher, J.T., & Weber, R. (2020) Integrating news framing, dynamic-transactional paradigms, and computational modeling: An examination of the dynamic relationship between news frames and real-world events. Journal of Communication. 70(3), 335-355.

Hopp, F.R., Fisher, J.T., Cornell, D., Huskey, R., & Weber, R. (2020). The extended moral foundations dictionary (eMFD): Development and applications of a crowd-sourced approach to extracting moral intuitions from text at scale. Behavior Research Methods. 53, 232–246.

Dienlin, T., Johannes, N., Bowman, N.D., Masur, P.K., Engesser, S., Kümpel, A.S., Lukito, J., Bier, L.M., Zhang, R., Johnson, B.K., Huskey, R., Fisher, J.T. ... De Vreese, C. (2020). An agenda for open science in communication. Journal of Communication. 71(1), 1-26.

Fisher, J.T., Hopp, F.R., Weber, R. (2019). Modality-specific effects of perceptual load in multimedia processing. Media & Communication. 7(4), 149-165.