A four-step approach to effective communication.
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This paper examines the role of culture as a factor in enhancing the effectiveness of health communication. We describe culture and how it may be applied in audience segmentation and introduce a model of health communication planning--McGuire's communication/persuasion model--as a framework for considering the ways in which culture may influence health communication effectiveness. For three components of the model (source, message, and channel factors), the paper reviews how each affects communication and persuasion, and how each may be affected by culture. We conclude with recommendations for future research on culture and health communication.
The use of tailored health communications has become a favored technique for persuading individuals to engage in health behaviors, such as screening mammography. This experiment examined the impact of tailoring persuasive health communications to one aspect of individuals' information-processing styles, that of the need for cognition (NFC), the enjoyment of thinking deeply about issues. To determine whether messages matched to an individual's NFC are more influential than mismatched messages, 602 women who called the Cancer Information Service (CIS) of the National Cancer Institute were asked to participate in an experiment at the end of their service call. They were assigned randomly to receive 1 of 2 phone messages promoting mammography use and a similarly tailored pamphlet 1 month later. Messages matched to an individual's NFC were better at motivating mammography 6 months later among high-NFC women. After controlling for prior mammography utilization, age, worry, intentions, perceived norms, suggestions to get a mammogram, and marital status, the interaction between participant NFC and message type also approached statistical significance. The differential influence of these brief, tailored communications diminished after 12 months, however.
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To improve health and reduce costs, we need to encourage patients to make better health care decisions. Since email is widely available, it may be useful for patient-directed interventions. However, we know little about how the contents of an email message can influence a health-related decision. We propose a model to understand how patients may process persuasive email messages.
The concept of voluntariness is central to an understanding of ethical considerations in two aspects of public health education practice: (1) the selection of appropriate interventions, and (2) the selection of appropriate targets for such interventions. The position is taken that most mass communications programs in public health education are persuasive as well as informative in intent. It is argued that the impact of such programs on voluntariness can be analyzed with regard to the rationality and resistibility of the persuasive appeals involved. Considerations of justice, as well as voluntariness and liberty, are reviewed in the discussion of appropriate targets for intervention. The issue of victim-blaming in public health education is explored, and conditions under which behavioral public health programs may be morally justifiable are suggested.
Adolescents' health attitudes and adherence to treatment for insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus (IDDM) were evaluated using the protection motivation theory (PMT). We expected cognitive appraisals of adherence (self-efficacy for treatment management, response efficacy of treatment, response costs of adherence) to be more influential for adherence than appraisals of nonadherence (rewards of nonadherence, perceptions of the risks of nonadherence, perceived severity of the risks). Adolescents (N = 101) with IDDM completed self-report measures of treatment adherence and of the PMT variables. Hierarchical regression analyses revealed that cognitions concerning adherence explained a statistically significant proportion of the variance in treatment adherence (sr2 = .17). Response costs of adherence produced the strongest correlations with overall adherence and with three of the four individual components of IDDM treatment (insulin injections, blood glucose monitoring, diet). The findings suggest that persuasive health communications might focus on appraisals of adherence rather than on risks of nonadherence.
Previous research demonstrated social influence resulting from mimicry (the chameleon effect); a confederate who mimicked participants was more highly regarded than a confederate who did not, despite the fact that participants did not explicitly notice the mimicry. In the current study, participants interacted with an embodied artificial intelligence agent in immersive virtual reality. The agent either mimicked a participant's head movements at a 4-s delay or utilized prerecorded movements of another participant as it verbally presented an argument. Mimicking agents were more persuasive and received more positive trait ratings than nonmimickers, despite participants' inability to explicitly detect the mimicry. These data are uniquely powerful because they demonstrate the ability to use automatic, indiscriminate mimicking (i.e., a computer algorithm blindly applied to all movements) to gain social influence. Furthermore, this is the first study to demonstrate social influence effects with a nonhuman, nonverbal mimicker.
Findings from previous studies of hormone-mediated behavior in women suggest that raised progesterone level increases the probability of behaviors that will reduce the likelihood of disruption to fetal development during pregnancy (e.g. increased avoidance of sources of contagion). Here, we tested women's (N=52) sensitivity to potential cues to nearby sources of contagion (disgusted facial expressions with averted gaze) and nearby physical threat (fearful facial expressions with averted gaze) at two points in the menstrual cycle differing in progesterone level. Women demonstrated a greater tendency to perceive fearful and disgusted expressions with averted gaze as more intense than those with direct gaze when their progesterone level was relatively high. By contrast, change in progesterone level was not associated with any change in perceptions of happy expressions with direct and averted gaze, indicating that our findings for disgusted and fearful expressions were not due to a general response bias. Collectively, our findings suggest women are more sensitive to facial cues signalling nearby contagion and physical threat when raised progesterone level prepares the body for pregnancy.
American media are the most violent in the world, and American society is now paying a high price in terms of real life violence. Research has confirmed that mass media violence contributes to aggressive behavior, fear, and desensitization of violence. Television, movies, music videos, computer/video games are pervasive media and represent important influences on children and adolescents. Portraying rewards and punishments and showing the consequences of violence are probably the two most essential contextual factors for viewers as they interpret the meaning of what they are viewing on television. Public health efforts have emphasized public education, media literacy campaign for children and parents, and an increased use of technology to prevent access to certain harmful medial materials.
BACKGROUND: Previous studies have demonstrated that less than 20% of fully eligible patients participate in cancer clinical trials. One of the major factors determining whether patients will be successfully accrued to trials is the quality of the communication occurring between the physician and patient (and family members if present). The accrual process is embedded within the longer-term relationship between the physician and the patient. It is argued that the interaction occurring during the consent process is part of an "alliance building" that the physician and patient use to confront the uncertainty inherent in both the disease itself and the outcome of therapy. METHODS AND RESULTS: The authors describe the framework of a study currently under way in which they are tracking the variation in ways that this interaction is managed by a sample of oncologists and their patients. Physicians and patients are simultaneously filmed and viewed in a split-screen format. A coding system is being developed to analyze the congruence between physicians and patients as they encode and decode sequences of verbal and nonverbal messages. The goal is to understand how physicians and patients manage uncertainty related to the disease and its outcomes. CONCLUSIONS: The authors suggest implications of these observed patterns for the broader range of communicative competencies that medical students must learn.
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Persuasion is a type of social influence aiming to produce changes in others' attitudes or behaviors. This study explores the relationship between emotions and persuasion, principal moderating factors, and physiological reactions during persuasive attempts. Following PRISMA guidelines, 28 empirical articles were analyzed, addressing emotions, affective/cognitive orientations, framing effects, and psychophysiological reactions. Mixed findings emerged regarding emotions, with fear appeals being effective in health education, while more recent studies favor the use of positive persuasive messages to increase behavior intention. Principal moderating factors included personal relevance, need for cognition (NFC) and need for affect (NFA), thought confidence, vulnerability, and efficacy beliefs. Psychophysiological studies revealed distinct physiological arousal during persuasion processing compared to a rest state. In addition, a greater misalignment between current behavior and the persuasive attempt led to perceived freedom threat and psychological reactance. These insights enhance persuasive effectiveness and deepen understanding of persuasion processes, guiding future research directions.