Musa Malik

Dr. Malik is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Oklahoma. His research examines how narratives shape the different ways in which people understand themselves, and those around them, with a particular focus on morality, representation, and human–technology interaction.

Dr. Malik’s research takes a computational, multilevel approach, drawing on natural language processing, computer vision, audio signal processing, and functional brain imaging to study narrative phenomena across societal, behavioral, and neural levels. He is also interested in developing computational tools and methods that facilitate large-scale communication research.

Dr. Malik’s research has appeared in journals including Communication Methods and Measures, Computational Communication Research, Journal of Language and Social Psychology, Journal of Media Psychology, Journal of Medical Internet Research, and NeuroImage. His work has also supported collaborations with industry and academic partners, including Snap Inc., the Annenberg Inclusion Initiative, and the Media Neuroscience Lab.

Dr. Malik holds a Ph.D. and M.A. in Communication from the University of California, Santa Barbara, and a B.S. in Neuroscience from New York University Shanghai.

Falcione, K., Malik, M., Wheeler, B., & Weber, R. (2026). Neural trajectories of gaming disorder accounting for psychopathology: Insights from the longitudinal ABCD study. NeuroImage, 337, Article 122036. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuroimage.2026.122036

Lee, H. E., Youk, S., Lee, Y. E., Malik, M., & Weber, R. (2025). Exploring neural idiosyncrasies in response to autonomous sensory meridian response videos: Naturalistic functional magnetic resonance imaging study of stress and sensory processing. Journal of Medical Internet Research, 27, Article e68586. https://doi.org/10.2196/68586

Wang, P. T., Malik, M., & Weber, R. (2025). Highlighting the role of morality in news framing and its short-term effects on stock market fluctuations. International Journal of Financial Studies, 13(2), Article 107. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijfs13020107

Malik, M., Youk, S., Hopp, F. R., Curry, O. S., Cheong, M., Alfano, M., & Weber, R. (2025). The extended Morality as Cooperation Dictionary (eMACD): A crowd-sourced approach via the Moral Narrative Analyzer platform. Communication Methods and Measures, 19(3), 201–231. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2025.2500329

Malik, M., Youk, S., & Weber, R. (2024). Beyond the screen: Exploring moral understanding via user comments on YouTube short films. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications, 36(4), 231–243. https://doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000430

Youk, S., Malik, M., Chen, Y., Hopp, F. R., & Weber, R. (2024). Measures of argument strength: A computational, large-scale analysis of effective persuasion in real-world debates. Communication Methods and Measures, 18(1), 7–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/19312458.2023.2230866

Chen, Y., Hopp, F. R., Malik, M., Wang, P. T., Woodman, K., Youk, S., & Weber, R. (2022). Reproducing FSL’s fMRI data analysis via Nipype: Relevance, challenges, and solutions. Frontiers in Neuroimaging, 1, Article 953215. https://doi.org/10.3389/fnimg.2022.953215

Malik, M., Hopp, F. R., & Weber, R. (2022). Representations of racial minorities in popular movies: A content-analytic synergy of computer vision and network science. Computational Communication Research, 4(1), 208–253. https://doi.org/10.5117/CCR2022.1.006.MALI

Malik, M., Hopp, F. R., Chen, Y., & Weber, R. (2021). Does regional variation in pathogen prevalence predict the moralization of language in COVID-19 news? Journal of Language and Social Psychology, 40(5–6), 653–676. https://doi.org/10.1177/0261927X211044194