Kimberly Gross
Associate Professor of Media and Public Affairs

Phone – (202) 994-0387
Fax – (202) 994-5806
E-mail – kimgross@gwu.edu
Office – MPA 444
Office Hours – Sabbatical until summer 2012

Expertise

Public opinion, Race and media, Framing effects on opinion and emotion

Education

Ph.D., Political Science, University of Michigan, 2001
B.A., Political Science, University of Wisconsin, 1990

Courses Taught

SMPA 102, Introduction to Political Communication
SMPA 120, Public Opinion
SMPA 160, Race, Media, and Politics
SMPA 161, Campaigns and Elections
SMPA 199, Senior Seminar
SMPA 241, Research Methods

Background

Kimberly Gross began teaching at the School of Media and Public Affairs in 2001. Her work focuses on media framing and public opinion and has appeared in the Journal of Communication, The American Journal of Political Science, The International Journal of Press Politics, The British Journal of Political Science and Political Psychology. Her current research focuses on the effects of framing on emotional response.

Gross's ongoing research projects include an exploration of the psychological processes that underlie framing effects with Paul Brewer of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and a project examining anti-Muslim stereotypes and the War on Terror with John Sides of George Washington University. She is also working on a paper on the portrayal of race in the 2008 election with two students in the School of Media and Public Affairs. Along with Paul Brewer and Sean Aday, she received National Science Foundation and Russell Sage Foundation grants to conduct a panel survey examining trust in government in the wake of the September 11th terrorist attacks. In the spring of 2006, Gross was a fellow at the Joan Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy at the John F. Kennedy School of Government. Gross has a Ph.D. in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation research examined the effects of media coverage of the 1992 Los Angeles riots on public opinion.

Selected Works

Kimberly Gross, Paul R. Brewer and Sean Aday. 2009. "Confidence in Government and Emotional Responses to Terrorism after September 11, 2001." American Politics Research 37: 107-128.

Kimberly Gross. 2008. "Framing Persuasive Appeals: Episodic and Thematic Framing, Emotional Response, and Policy Opinion." Political Psychology 29:169-192.

Kimberly Gross and Lisa D'Ambrosio. 2004. "Framing emotional response." Political Psychology 25(1):1-29.

Paul R. Brewer, Kimberly Gross, Sean Aday and Lars Willnat. 2004. "International trust and public opinion about world affairs." American Journal of Political Science 48(1)93-109.

Gross, Kimberly and Aday, Sean (2003). "The Scary World in Your Living Room and Your Neighborhood: Using Local Broadcast News, Neighborhood Crime Rates, and Personal Experience to Test Agenda Setting and Cultivation Hypotheses." Journal of Communication 3(3):411-426 .