Health Communication最新文献

Transgender populations face disproportionate health challenges, including elevated mental health risks and limited access to gender-affirming care, compounded by systemic discrimination and stigma. In response, online forums have become critical spaces for health information exchange, peer support, and resilience-building among this population. Within these spaces, individuals negotiate stigma, identity, and care-seeking through shared language and narratives. To understand these dynamics, the present study examines discourse in two Reddit communities, r/transgender and r/transhealth, using Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC-22) and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) to analyze emotional tone, analytical thinking, authenticity, clout, and thematic content. Results show that r/transgender discourse often reflects the emotional toll of distal stressors, emphasizing identity negotiation and emotional processing, while r/transhealth features solution-oriented dialogs focused on navigating healthcare systems and sharing affirming care experiences. These findings extend Minority Stress Theory into digital contexts, illustrating how community norms shape coping strategies ranging from emotional validation to practical problem-solving. Insights from this study can inform more empathetic, culturally competent communication between healthcare providers, institutions, and transgender patients to improve trust, engagement, and health outcomes.

Patients are engaging in unprecedented levels of online health information-seeking (e.g., via TikTok, Google). Guided by shared decision-making (SDM) theorizing, this study illuminates health care workers' (HCWs) perspectives of patients' use of online health information in clinical encounters. We identify third-party health information (i.e., health information from beyond a clinical encounter) as a decision-making agent in the SDM process. Applying reflexive thematic to analyze 17 interviews with HCWs, our findings revealed how online health information influences the SDM process by shifting perceptions of decision-making orientation and heightening patients' sense of agency. Our findings also reveal how HCWs navigate SDM when patients use online health information by praising the new-age information economy, promoting mediated health literacy to moderate patient health anxiety, and prioritizing and validating patients' lived experiences. We conclude by discussing implications for SDM and practical implications for HCWs.

Given calls for greater attention to culture in interpersonal health communication research, we interviewed 29 South Asian women between the ages of 18 and 60 managing chronic health issues to explore culturally specific dilemmas in health-related talk within families. Guided by normative rhetorical theory, our findings narrate polysemic meanings of health as generational, communal, and personal. These meanings created dilemmas centered on what it means to care and for whom, with women describing discursive challenges in privileging their own health without dishonoring their (grand)mothers' health experiences, disrupting family harmony, or neglecting their duties and obligations. In response, women adopted different interpretive lenses to embrace the both/and nature of their membership in multiple cultures of care. Findings have implications for interpersonal and health communication theory, highlighting how fractures in cultural norms manifest as discrete interactional dilemmas in everyday communication about health in families.

Although menstruation is a biologically significant part of life, U.S. menstruators struggle with managing their menstrual cycle. One tool developed to aid in this process is the menstrual cup. A menstrual cup is a bell-shaped device, made of medical grade silicone, used to collect menstrual blood, and has been identified as a safe, cost-effective and environmentally beneficial menstrual management tool. Despite its benefits, menstrual cups remain underutilized and under-researched within United States contexts. As such, this study serves as a first step to understand perceptions of menstrual cups by U.S. menstruators. Qualitative responses were collected using Amazon's Mechanical Turk, then thematically analyzed using the extended parallel process model as a guiding framework to understand menstruators' beliefs regarding the product. Findings from N = 341 participants (M = 38.8 years; SD = 9.6) ranging from ages 21 to 75, illustrate the constructs of self-efficacy and response efficacy and were found to align with participant perceptions of advantages and disadvantages of the menstrual cup. Theoretical and practical contributions, including how communication theory can help understand the reasons why people may choose to adopt a new menstrual management tool, are addressed.

Existing research on vaccination communication has emphasized commercial marketing and social mobilization, while culturally attuned approaches remain underexplored. This study examines how the Chinese state moralizes vaccine promotion on social media in emergencies. Using content analysis of 205 government-produced videos and 58 stakeholder interviews, we find that state actors frame vaccination as a civilizational practice that merges Confucian ethics with biomedical rationales. Simultaneously, they harness entertainment affordances that intertwine playful performance, ritualization, and interactivity to amplify affective resonance and foster participatory engagement. This dual strategy reframes vaccination from a solely obligatory act into a socially meaningful, even enjoyable, act. However, we also identify a critical caveat: when moral appeals become excessive, they may reduce message receptivity. Our findings suggest that effective vaccine communication should bound moralization. Specifically, communication can be more effective by focusing on key ethical messages, using supportive, dialogue-oriented tones, and connecting moral narratives with practical guidance. We introduce a bounded moralization framework that reconciles collectivist and individualist orientations, balances entertainment with epistemic authority, and optimizes the communication dynamics between state and society. Practically, this framework offers guidance for designing culturally grounded health campaigns that are both persuasive and respectful of public needs.

The purpose of this study was to explore the clinical experiences and perceptions regarding three talk model shared decision-making (SDM) practices among different specialty of resident physicians in Taiwan. Resident physicians from a teaching hospital in Southern Taiwan were recruited using purposive sampling. In total, 19 residents participated in one-on-one, in-depth, qualitative, and semi-structured interviews regarding their experiences practicing SDM with their patients. Among these residents, five were from internal medicine, five were from surgery, five were from family medicine, and four were from emergency medicine. The results are as follows: (1) Residents' SDM experiences aligned with all three stages of the three talk model. In the Team Talk stage, they emphasized engaging patients and families, especially in complex cases or when family opinions differed, through a three-way dialogue among physicians, patients, and families. (2) In the Option Talk stage, they prioritized explaining treatment options, including benefits, risks, and lifestyle implications, and encouraging patients and families to express concerns and preferences to support informed decisions. (3) In the Decision Talk stage, they highlighted the importance of in-depth communication to understand patient needs and preferences, summarize and confirm information, and reach a shared consensus. (4) SDM practices differed among specialties due to variations in clinical context and time constraints. Consequently, these findings underscore the need for strategies tailored to each specialty. Tailored SDM training and decision-support tools can bridge the theory-practice gap, strengthen physician-patient relationships, and enhance care quality.

As social virtual reality (social VR) platforms increasingly captivate users worldwide, questions arise about how digitally mediated self-representation affects psychological health. This study investigates how avatar characteristics-specifically perceived avatar appearance similarity and perceived attractiveness-shape users' well-being in social VR, with a focus on the mediating role of avatar identification. Drawing on two-wave longitudinal data collected over a three-month period from 486 VRChat users, the findings reveal that perceived avatar attractiveness was positively associated with users' satisfaction with virtual life through enhanced avatar identification. However, perceived similarity did not exert a significant positive influence. Notably, while identification with attractive avatars supported virtual well-being, avatar attractiveness was also negatively associated with self-acceptance, suggesting a complex relationship between virtual self-presentation and mental health outcomes. These results highlight the critical psychological processes through which virtual identity communication is associated with users' well-being and self-perception. This study calls for greater attention within health communication research to the ways avatar-mediated interactions in emerging digital environments can both support and challenge mental health.

The rise of social media short-form videos has led to an increase in health professionals demonstrating medical procedures online, including Pap tests for cervical cancer screening. This study uses an online experiment to investigate the effects of showing the vaginal speculum in short-form social media videos (i.e. TikTok videos) encouraging Pap tests, alongside the impact of framing the content to address common barriers to testing. The findings reveal the presence of the speculum led to significantly higher ratings of fear though the level of fear was modest. Videos framed to address knowledge barriers (i.e. providing information about the importance of Pap tests and screening guidelines) were perceived as more effective than those framed to address psychological barriers (i.e. providing information about avoiding pain and discomfort during the test) and increased the likelihood of getting a Pap test. The knowledge barrier frame also resulted in less defensive avoidance compared to the psychological barrier. Most importantly, the study's examination of the combined influence of the two-message features shows that the presence of the speculum can either help or hinder the persuasive outcomes of the message depending upon the video's framing. Likelihood of getting a Pap test was greatest when the speculum was shown in conjunction with knowledge barrier framing and lowest when the speculum was shown in videos with psychological barrier framing, suggesting a possible cognitive overload effect. These findings provide practical and theoretical insights into how emotionally evocative imagery can influence message outcomes, sometimes unintentionally eliciting fear and undermining persuasive effects.

Guided by the communicated sense-making model, we describe the results of an analysis of interviews with 15 Black women about their experiences with postpartum depression (PPD). The findings indicate that the women made sense of their experience using three categories of metaphors: (1) mobility, (2) cultural expectations, and (3) social support. These categories of metaphors provide evidence that the discourse of motherhood as distressing is expressed in the narratives of Black women with PPD, even as they seek to fulfill the demands of the discourse of motherhood as intensive. The metaphors also reveal that Black mothers with PPD struggle with the cultural pressure placed on them to act as a strong Black woman/mother. As a result, the participants demonstrate that cultural expectations expressed by their social network add to the motherhood as distressing discourse. Finally, the study makes an argument for the inclusion of metaphors as a viable and supporting device in the communicated sense-making model. Implications for practical and future applications are presented.

Scholars speculate that injunctive norms messages elicit more psycholgical reactance compared to descriptive norms messages. This research argues that the commonly employed linguistic variations of injunctive norms messages account for reactance effects rather than the injunctive norms vs. descriptive norms difference itself. We employed a 5 (norms messaging: descriptive norms vs. injunctive norms approval vs. injunctive norms disapproval vs. injunctive norms should vs. injunctive norms must) × 2 (topic: responsible drinking vs. nutritious diet) between-subjects experiment (N = 424) to test the degree to which specific injunctive norms messages elicit reactance. The findings indicated that the injunctive norms must message produced a significantly stronger perceived freedom threat than both the descriptive norms message and the injunctive norms should message. Moreover, serial mediation suggested that after the exposure to the injunctive norms must message, participants reported stronger perceived freedom threat and psychological reactance, followed by more unfavorable attitudes and weaker behavioral intention to engage in responsible drinking and a healthy diet. No differences occurred between the injunctive norms approval and disapproval messages. The results provide theoretical and empirical clarity for the relationship between social norms messaging and psychological reactance and offer practical guidance for social norm-based public health interventions.