Democracy is based on individuals' ability to give their opinions freely. To do this, they must have access to a multitude of reliable information sources (Dahl, 1998), and this greatly depends on the characteristics of their media environments. Today, one of the main issues individuals face is the significant amount of disinformation circulating…

The rhetorical appropriateness of two of Shirley Chisholm's persuasive speeches on women's liberation were assessed using Afrocentric criteria for speech criticism developed by Molefi K. Asante (1979). The speeches addressed the controversy of whether the women's liberation movement was appropriate for women of minority cultures in the United…

This collection of abstracts is part of a continuing series providing information on recent doctoral dissertations. The 21 titles deal with a variety of topics, including the following: the relationships among psychological differentiation, situational context, and linguistics; the effect of cognitive complexity and audience attitude on persuasive…