First-Person, Third-Person, or Bystander? Exploring the Persuasive Influence of Perspective in Mental Health Narratives.

As evidence suggests that college students are particularly vulnerable to mental health distress and illness, guidance for designing messages that inspire help-seeking behavior is needed. The purpose of this study was to evaluate the influence of perspective of storytelling on health message involvement and persuasion. A controlled experiment (N= 430) compared the influence of online mental health narratives targeted to college students that featured a bystander perspective to those that used first- and third-person perspectives. Evidence suggests that the bystander perspective was more effective for producing persuasive outcomes, including mental health information recall and beliefs. Results also indicate that self-referencing mediated the effects of message involvement on outcomes across all message conditions. People with experience with mental illness became involved with and were influenced by mental health narratives in different ways.

Entertainment-Education Campaigns and COVID-19: How Three Global Organizations Adapted the Health Communication Strategy for Pandemic Response and Takeaways for the Future.

COVID-19 created a substantial set of challenges for health communication practitioners in the process of planning, implementing, and evaluating entertainment-education (EE) campaigns. EE is a theory and evidence-based communication strategy that employs entertainment media for educational messaging. Here, we briefly review EE campaigns in response to previous health emergencies and present three cases of EE responses to the COVID-19 pandemic from leading global organizations (PCI Media, BBC Media Action, and Sesame Workshop). Responses ranged from adaptation and re-distribution of existing content to creating new content under social-distancing restrictions and utilizing transmedia. These cases demonstrate that EE initiatives responding to future pandemics may be well served by starting with existing infrastructure to quickly build capacity, support, and trust; working with partners to tailor programs to the local context; and continuing to focus on good storytelling while simultaneously considering evolving media formats and theory.

Influence of Natural American Spirit advertising on current and former smokers' perceptions and intentions.

OBJECTIVE: This study sought to demonstrate causal effects of exposure to Natural American Spirit (NAS) advertising content on misinformed beliefs of current and former smokers, and to empirically establish these beliefs as a mechanism driving intentions to use NAS. METHODS: Our study employed a randomised experimental design with 1128 adult daily, intermittent and former smokers. We compared participants who were exposed to NAS advertisements or claims made in the advertisements with those in a no-message control group to test the effects of NAS advertising content on inaccurate beliefs about NAS and attitudes and intentions towards the product. RESULTS: One-way analysis of variance revealed that exposure to NAS advertisements produced inaccurate beliefs about the composition of NAS cigarettes among current and former smokers (p<0.05). Planned contrasts indicated a compilation of arguments taken directly from NAS advertisements resulted in significantly greater beliefs that NAS cigarettes are healthier/safer than other cigarettes (for former smokers, t(472)=3.63, p<0.001; for current smokers, t(644)=2.86, p=0.004), demonstrating that suggestive claims used in the brand's marketing have effects on beliefs not directly addressed in the advertisements. Regression and mediation analyses showed that health-related beliefs predict attitudes towards NAS for current and former smokers, and mediate intentions to use NAS. CONCLUSIONS: The findings of this study provide causal support for the need for further regulatory action to address the potentially harmful ramifications of claims used in NAS advertising.

How Is Marijuana Vaping Portrayed on YouTube? Content, Features, Popularity and Retransmission of Vaping Marijuana YouTube Videos.

The purpose of the study is to investigate how vaping marijuana, a novel but emerging risky health behavior, is portrayed on YouTube, and how the content and features of these YouTube videos influence their popularity and retransmission. A content analysis of vaping marijuana YouTube videos published between July 2014 to June 2015 (n = 214) was conducted. Video genre, valence, promotional and warning arguments, emotional appeals, message sensation value, presence of misinformation and misleading information, and user-generated statistics, including number of views, comments, shares, likes and dislikes, were coded. The results showed that these videos were predominantly pro-marijuana-vaping, with the most frequent videos being user-sharing. The genre and message features influenced the popularity, evaluations, and retransmission of vaping marijuana YouTube videos. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.

Online cancer news: trends regarding article types, specific cancers, and the cancer continuum.

The Internet is one of the fastest growing news sources for many worldwide (Pew Research Center's Project for Excellence in Journalism, 2011), and cancer news is one frequently consumed form of online health information (Google, Inc., 2007). This content analysis of online cancer news (n = 862) retrieved from the four most frequented news websites describes trends regarding specific cancers, stages in the cancer continuum, and types of news articles. In general, treatment information received the most attention in online cancer news. Breast cancer received the most attention of each specific cancer, followed by digestive and genitourinary cancers. Research reports and profiles of people (more than 60% of which were about celebrities) were the most common article types. Risk, uncertainty, and clinical trials were also present across several types of cancer news articles. Implications of content trends are discussed as relevant to consumers, producers, health campaign designers, and researchers alike.

The Potential for Narrative Correctives to Combat Misinformation†.

Misinformation can influence personal and societal decisions in detrimental ways. Not only is misinformation challenging to correct, but even when individuals accept corrective information, misinformation can continue to influence attitudes: a phenomenon known as belief echoes, affective perseverance, or the continued influence effect. Two controlled experiments tested the efficacy of narrative-based correctives to reduce this affective residual in the context of misinformation about organic tobacco. Study 1 (N = 385) tested within-narrative corrective endings, embedded in four discrete emotions (happiness, anger, sadness, and fear). Study 2 (N = 586) tested the utility of a narrative with a negative, emotional corrective ending (fear and anger). Results provide some evidence that narrative correctives, with or without emotional endings, can be effective at reducing misinformed beliefs and intentions, but narratives consisting of emotional corrective endings are better at correcting attitudes than a simple corrective. Implications for misinformation scholarship and corrective message design are discussed.

Attitudinal Spillover from Misleading Natural Cigarette Marketing: An Experiment Examining Current and Former Smokers' Support for Tobacco Industry Regulation.

This research examined the influence of natural cigarette advertising on tobacco control policy support, and the potential for misbeliefs arising from exposure to cigarette marketing to affect such support. Ample research indicates that natural cigarettes such as Natural American Spirit (NAS) are widely and erroneously perceived as safer than their traditional counterparts because of their marketed "natural" composition. Yet regulatory action regarding natural cigarette marketing has been limited in scope, and little research has examined whether misleading product advertising affects support for related policy, an important component of the policy process. Here, we administered a large-scale randomized experiment (n = 1128), assigning current and former smokers in the United States to an NAS advertising condition or a control group and assessing their support for tobacco industry regulation. Results show that exposure to NAS advertising reduces support for policies to ban potentially misleading terminology from cigarette advertising, and these effects are stronger for daily smokers. Further, misinformed beliefs about the healthy composition of NAS partially mediate effects on policy support. Yet interestingly, exposure to NAS marketing does not reduce support for policies to establish standards for when certain terms are permissible in cigarette advertising. The results of this analysis indicate potential spillover effects from exposure to NAS advertising in the realm of support for regulatory action pertaining to tobacco industry marketing.

Identifying Potential Campaign Themes to Prevent Youth Initiation of E-Cigarettes.

Once a target audience and a health behavior of interest are selected for a potential mass media campaign, the next task is selecting beliefs about the health behavior to serve as the basis for campaign message content. For novel health behaviors, such as the use of emerging tobacco products, limited empirical research on beliefs about these behaviors exists. A multimethod approach was applied to generate potential campaign beliefs for emerging behaviors. Three methods were conducted in this investigation in order to generate a list of potential testable campaign beliefs, using youth e-cigarette use as a case study: (1) a search of published and unpublished literature including gathering measures from several national surveys (through 2016), (2) an online elicitation survey (conducted in 2016), and (3) unsupervised topic modeling of media texts (from 2014 to 2015, analyzed in 2016). Details are provided on how each method was employed to both generate and prioritize beliefs related to youth e-cigarette use into a final set of 115 beliefs across 23 belief themes. This multimethod approach can provide four utilities when thinking through a health campaign for novel health behaviors: (1) developing an exhaustive and complementary list of beliefs, (2) generating overarching themes and distilling larger themes into more nuanced beliefs, (3) identifying language most relevant to the target population, and (4) prioritizing beliefs for message pilot testing with members of the target audience. SUPPLEMENT INFORMATION: This article is part of a supplement entitled Fifth Anniversary Retrospective of "The Real Cost," the Food and Drug Administration's Historic Youth Smoking Prevention Media Campaign, which is sponsored by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

Do Emotions Spark Interest in Alternative Tobacco Products?

BACKGROUND: Exposure to advertisements for tobacco products and tobacco warning labels evokes emotions. This study evaluated the association of discrete positive and negative emotions with interest in alternative tobacco products. METHOD: In 2013, 1,226 U.S. adult nonsmokers and current smokers viewed advertisements for moist snuff, snus, and electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) with various warning labels and then indicated their emotional responses in terms of anger, anxiety, sadness, guilt, disgust, discouragement, hope, and contentment. Outcomes were openness to using moist snuff, snus, and e-cigarettes in the future and interest in a free sample of each product. Data were analyzed in 2016. RESULTS: Hope was positively associated with openness and interest across all alternative tobacco products as was contentment for moist snuff and snus. Anger was negatively associated with openness to moist snuff and e-cigarettes, disgust negatively to moist snuff and snus, and anxiety negatively to e-cigarettes. Being a current smoker, ever trying a corresponding product, being male, and younger age were associated with greater openness to and interest in moist snuff and snus. For e-cigarettes, being a current smoker, ever trying e-cigarettes, and being female were associated with greater openness, and being a current smoker was associated with greater odds of selecting a free sample. CONCLUSIONS: Positive emotions, particularly hope, were consistently positively associated with interest in alternative tobacco products. Hope is widely used by tobacco and e-cigarette companies to advertise their products. Antitobacco messages should aim to lower hope associated with tobacco products but increase hope for cessation or life without tobacco.