College of Liberal Arts & Sciences
Austin Beattie

Austin Beattie (MA, Western Michigan University) is a Doctoral Candidate and advisee of Dr. Kate Magsamen-Conrad and Dr. Andrew C. High (The Pennsylvania State University). His research focusses on social support in computer-mediated and human-machine communication contexts.
Austin is featured in The University of Iowa’s 2022 “Dare to Discover” campaign, you can read more about his research here: https://dare.research.uiowa.edu/beattie-austin/ or on Google Scholar: https://bit.ly/3Mnt8wC
Courses Taught:
- COMM:2057 Intro to Computer-Mediated Communication
- COMM:2091 Organizational Communication
- COMM:2020 Health Communication
- COMM:1305 Understanding Communication: Social Scientific Research Methods
- COMM:1112 Interpersonal Communication
Selected Publications and Conference Papers:
Edwards, C., Beattie, A. J., Edwards, A., & Spence, P. R. (2016). Differences in perceptions of communication quality between a Twitterbot and human agent for information seeking and learning. Computers in Human Behavior, 65, 666-671.
Beattie, A. J., Edwards, C., & Williams, M. J. (2018). Telepresence Group Leaders Receive Higher Ratings of Social Attractiveness and Leadership Quality. In Companion of the 2018 ACM/IEEE International Conference on Human-Robot Interaction (pp. 61-62). ACM.
Beattie, A. J., & Richards, R. (2018). Want to talk a-bot it?: The human-to-human interaction script and robot support providers. Paper presented at the 68th annual conference of the International Communication Association, Prague, Czech Republic.
Beattie, A. J., Edwards, A. L., & Edwards, C. (2020) A Bot and a Smile: Interpersonal Impressions of Chatbots and Humans Using Emoji in Computer-mediated Communication, Communication Studies, 71 DOI: 10.1080/10510974.2020.1725082
Beattie, A., & High, A. C. (2022). I Get by With a Little Help From My Bots: Implications of Machine Agents in the Context of Social Support. Human-Machine Communication, 4(1), 8. DOI: https://doi.org/10.30658/hmc.4.8