Health Communication最新文献

Support people are often both physically and emotionally involved in patients' cancer-care trajectories with first-hand knowledge of the patient's health; they also harbor their own fears and concerns. When present in the medical interaction, support people report hesitancy to share patient information and concerns with clinicians, although they deem this information is important for patient care. Framed in the disclosure decision-making model, this study examines how support people's perceptions of clinician empathic communication affect their disclosure efficacy, and how these concepts relate to outcomes of holding back information about patient health or their own fears and concerns. Participants included support people (N  = 129) recruited from the Love Research Army® who completed an online survey. Analyses investigated how disclosure efficacy influences the association between perceived clinician empathic communication and support person holding back patient health information (model 1) and support person holding back their own fears and concerns (model 2). Overall, results identify differences in support people's holding back when making disclosure decisions related to patients' physical health versus their own fears and concerns. Greater disclosure efficacy shaped the relationship between perceived clinician empathic communication and lower levels of holding back patient health information, bolstering the importance of clinician empathic communication with support people of cancer patients.

Covid-19 is still a major public health issue in the United States and one of the most effective ways to minimize the damage caused by this illness is through encouraging individuals to receive vaccines and keep up with vaccine boosters. However, many individuals remain vaccine-hesitant. The current project examines the most effective way to persuade vaccine hesitant individuals through a textual message-based experiment. Psychological reactance, messaging framing (loss and gain), and autonomy restoring messages are examined to determine their effectiveness in moving the vaccine-hesitant to vaccine accepting. A 3 (frame: loss/gain/neutral) X 2 (autonomy restoration script/filler) between-subjects experiment was conducted using a sample of 605 participants over the age of 18 who either had not received any COVID-19 vaccine or any type of COVID-19 vaccine booster. Findings suggest that individuals who had not received any vaccination varied in their psychological reactance compared to those who had at least an initial vaccination. Framing was also found to play an important part in feelings of lost autonomy and that restoration messages helped reduce feelings of lost autonomy. Further, feelings of loss of freedom created more psychological reactance and could cause increases in vaccine resistance. Mediation effects were also supported, indicating that message framing and autonomy restoration influenced vaccine hesitancy indirectly through perceived threats to freedom and psychological reactance.

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is the psychological response to experiencing and/or witnessing a traumatic event. With over 100 million of the global adult population afflicted with this disorder, more systematic research on PTSD is essential, and the COVID-19 pandemic increased that need. Extant research suggests communication lies at the center of PTSD prevention, symptom mitigation, and recovery, yet communication researchers have largely failed to address the disorder. To advance theory and empirical research, this paper presents a systematic review of PTSD studies in communication literature. Content and computational analyses of 84 relevant articles from three databases show that PTSD research primarily focuses on the military, journalists, and survivors of terrorist attacks. In addition, those with PTSD rely on social networks and support to combat social stigma and self-isolation. Based on these findings, we present four fruitful areas for future research on PTSD across diverse subfields: (1) social networks, (2) diverse populations, (3) social identity, and (4) resilience.

Breast cancer is a significant health concern globally, including in Nigeria, where its incidence is rising. An essential component of breast cancer care is the psychosocial wellbeing of patients, which is often shaped by the language used in healthcare and society. While some research has explored stigmatization of breast cancer patients, no study has focused on language as a tool for this stigmatization in Nigeria. This study examines how language perpetuates the stigmatization of breast cancer patients and explores ways to use language to improve their lives and health. Using Norman Fairclough's model of critical discourse analysis and a descriptive design, data was collected through interviews with 50 respondents at the University College Hospital in Ibadan, Nigeria. The study's discourse analysis revealed that stigmatization is perpetuated through language, including negative stereotypes, body shaming, spiritual interpretations, and derogatory terms. These discourses reflect broader social and cultural factors such as norms, beliefs, and power dynamics that reinforce stigmatization. The research highlights the effects of stigmatizing language, including denial, loss of femininity, shame, and fear of a new identity. The findings call for policies and interventions to reduce stigma, improve patient experiences, and raise public awareness of breast cancer.

Social media are increasingly becoming public venues for patients to create and share illness narratives. While prior research has primarily focused on the positive and supportive roles of social media in patients' seeking and obtaining social support, little is known about the possible negative impacts of lacking feedback when sharing illness narratives on these connected and interactive platforms. By incorporating the notion of cyber-ostracism from social psychology and drawing upon Williams's temporal need-threat model (TNTM), this study proposed and tested a series of serial-parallel mediation models that link feedback amount, psychological well-being, and/or various coping intentions (i.e. to withdraw from social media narration sharing and to positively/negatively comment on others' narratives), sequentially through perceived ostracism and different need satisfaction (i.e. for belonging, self-esteem, meaningful existence, and control). Findings of this study move beyond the longstanding focus on the narrative relief effects, shedding light on the backfire effects of sharing illness narratives when such narratives received little or even no feedback from others in the social media environment.

Chinese women face a tremendous threat of cervical cancer alongside low rates of human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccination. Online cancer information has become a driving force of HPV vaccination, but the underlying mechanism remains unclear. Drawing upon the three-stage model of health promotion, this study examines the relationships between online cancer information seeking and scanning and HPV vaccination intention among unvaccinated Chinese women. Specifically, the mediating roles of HPV knowledge and perceived efficacy for cancer prevention and the moderating role of information elaboration were tested. Results from a national online survey (N = 404) indicate that both information seeking and scanning are positively associated with HPV vaccination intention through improving HPV knowledge and perceived cancer prevention efficacy. Additionally, information seeking directly and positively correlates with perceived cancer prevention efficacy, while information scanning is directly related to increased HPV vaccination intention. Information elaboration also strengthens the indirect pathway linking information seeking and vaccination intention via the sequential mediation chain. Theoretically, the results extend the three-stage model by demonstrating the distinct roles of information seeking and scanning in HPV vaccination intention. Practically, our findings can inform health organizations and informatics professionals to develop promotional campaigns to improve knowledge, empower unvaccinated women, and encourage vaccination uptake.

Caregivers often experience stress, depression, anxiety, and various physical illnesses stemming from the demands and challenges of their caregiving role. However, adaptive coping mechanisms such as benefit finding can mitigate these outcomes. The present study explored the relationship between Alzheimer's diagnostic severity and caregivers' engaging in benefit finding and, more specifically, whether prosocial relational maintenance behaviors communicated by the patient to the caregiver mediates the relationship between severity and benefit finding. A sample of 152 current or former Alzheimer's caregivers completed an online survey measuring their care recipient's Alzheimer's diagnostic severity, their own propensity for benefit finding, and how often the care recipient performed relational maintenance behaviors toward them as the caregiver. Results showed no direct effect existed between Alzheimer's diagnostic severity and caregivers' benefit finding; however, the extent that patients performed relational maintenance behaviors with their caregiver mediated the relationship between Alzheimer's diagnostic severity and caregivers' benefit finding. The significant influence of relational maintenance behaviors underlines the importance and effect of communication between caregivers and care recipients throughout the progression of a disease like Alzheimer's.

This study was designed to test two message features (autonomy support and evidence type) found in clinical trial recruitment videos on social media. Using an online experiment in which 606 individuals watched short-form videos about clinical trials, we assessed the impact of varying autonomy support conditions (supportive vs. non-supportive) and incorporating exemplars of a previous clinical trial participant's experience (vs. base-rate information about participating). The findings show that communicating about clinical trials with an autonomy-supportive approach can reduce psychological reactance and improve perceived message effectiveness, attitudes toward clinical trial participation, intentions to engage with the content (i.e., "liking" and sharing the content), and intentions to participate in clinical trials. When combined with an exemplar, autonomy-supportive messaging can be especially effective at reducing psychological reactance and improving attitudes toward clinical trials. The findings are well-timed, as researchers are increasingly turning to social media to enhance clinical trial recruitment.

Adolescent idiopathic scoliosis (AIS), affecting approximately one in every 25 children, presents significant lifelong physical and psychosocial challenges. However, a systematic understanding of the sources of this uncertainty and how individuals communicatively navigate it is lacking. Thus, this qualitative study applied uncertainty management theory (UMT) to examine participants' uncertainty associated with scoliosis. The investigation identified key sources of uncertainty (medical, financial, social, and career) and management strategies through semi-structured interviews with 21 individuals diagnosed with scoliosis in adolescence. Participants appraised their uncertainty as either negative or neutral. In alignment with how they appraised their uncertainty, some interviewees sought to reduce uncertainty by seeking social support and by disclosing or concealing their illness. Others maintained uncertainty by avoiding medical information (or by being told to wait and see about their disease progression), and some adapted to their uncertainty by reframing or engaging in self-care or religion. The results highlight the need for greater medical, psychological, and social support for those diagnosed with scoliosis and highlight the importance of developing tailored uncertainty management strategies to improve patients' quality of life.

Given the increasing scholarly attention to health information avoidance, the current study offers a more nuanced perspective on this communication phenomenon by predicting avoidance intention and behavior and examining their interrelationship. Guided by a reduced version of the proposed model of planned risk information avoidance (PRIA), a combination of a pre-survey capturing the predictors of avoidance intention and an in-situ measurement of avoidance behavior showed that the model explained 36.1% of the variance in avoidance intention, but only 6% of the variance in the occurrence of avoidance behavior and 5.1% of the variance in the frequency of avoidance behavior. Together with the weak correlation between avoidance intention and behavior, this finding revealed an intention-behavior gap for health information avoidance and suggests that the two measures represent different dimensions of health information avoidance. These findings are critical for conceptual clarity, call for distinguishing the predictors of avoidance intention and behavior within the PRIA, and provide guidance for methodological decisions.