Research Interests:
Dr. Hoffner is interested in a wide range of psychologically-oriented research topics, primarily within the domain of mass communication. She conducts research using experiments, surveys, and content analysis, and characterizes herself as a quantitative social scientist. Much of her research has dealt with children's response to mass media, including emotional reactions to scary films and disturbing news, comforting of frightened co-viewers, parasocial attachments to TV characters, and television comprehension.

She has also examined news coverage of the TV violence issue, and public perceptions of the effects of TV violence. She has also studied other issues related to emotion, including how children learn to interpret emotion cues, and how people cope with negative emotions.

Research topics she plans to pursue in the future include: individual differences in response to horror films, adults' parasocial attachment to media characters, and selective exposure to negative news and health-related media messages.

Teaching Interests:
Her teaching interests focus on mass media theories and effects, in addition to research methods and statistics. Her graduate seminars have dealt with several topics, including one that integrated emotion theory with related mass communication research, and another that examined children and the mass media.