My research is focused on issues such as the role of charisma in politics, political personalization, media effects in political campaigns, media effects during political conflicts, mediated public diplomacy and information processing of politicians. Currently I lead two large-scaled projects. The first centers on the effects of political culture and narrative proximity between nations and people, and their role in such issues as international communication flow, public diplomacy and electoral behavior. The second develops advanced state-of- the-art computational text analysis methods for analyzing and understanding complex and multi-layered public discourse around the world.