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At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources
PubMed1989

Influences of misleading postevent information: misinformation interference and acceptance.

Because of the biasing nature of retrieval tests, evidence that the introduction of misleading postevent information will impair the memory for an original event has recently been in dispute. In two experiments, a retrieval test sensitive to both biasing effects of misinformation (misinformation acceptance) and influences of the misinformation on memory (misinformation interference) was used. Both experiments demonstrated misinformation acceptance, and one of the experiments suggested that misinformation interferes with the ability to remember the original event. Two misinformation interference hypotheses are evaluated; they suggest that the misinformation may have either impaired memory or led to confusion regarding what had occurred during the event.

Adolescent↗
PubMed2026

Navigating Social Media: Balancing Connectivity With Media Literacy to Combat Misinformation and Protect Mental Well-Being.

BACKGROUND: The pervasive use of social media has created a complex digital ecosystem where high connectivity coexists with significant challenges, including the rapid spread of misinformation, particularly regarding mental health, and documented negative impacts on psychological well-being. Platform architectures designed for engagement maximization have been identified as central factors in both issues. OBJECTIVE: This paper critically analyzes the interconnected relationships between social media use, misinformation dissemination, and mental health impacts, with particular attention to psychiatric misinformation across diagnostic categories (e.g., depression, anxiety, ADHD). A primary objective is to evaluate the potential of advanced critical digital literacy frameworks to serve as protective mechanisms against these dual threats. METHODS: A systematic search was conducted following PRISMA 2020 guidelines across APA PsycInfo, PubMed, JSTOR, and Google Scholar for literature published between January 2018 and March 2026 (updated from the original 2023 search). The search yielded 2672 records. After removing 624 duplicates, 2048 records underwent title and abstract screening, with 1802 excluded. The remaining 246 full-text articles were assessed for eligibility, resulting in 86 studies included in the final qualitative synthesis. Inter-rater reliability was established (Cohen's κ = 0.82). Quality assessment was conducted using the Joanna Briggs Institute Checklist, AXIS, and CASP tools, with findings weighted by methodological quality. A thematic analysis was undertaken to synthesize findings. RESULTS: The analysis reveals that core architectural features of social media platforms, algorithmic curation and engagement-based metrics, simultaneously foster environments ripe for misinformation spread and contribute to psychological distress, including anxiety, depression, and harmful social comparison. Psychiatric misinformation specifically (e.g., inaccurate claims about treatment effectiveness, diagnostic criteria, and medication side effects) represents a growing concern, particularly on image- and video-based platforms. The findings indicate that conventional media literacy approaches focused solely on fact-checking are insufficient. Instead, a critical digital literacy framework encompassing algorithmic awareness, data literacy, and emotional awareness is essential for building user resilience, with evidence from high-quality systematic reviews supporting this approach. CONCLUSIONS: Navigating the complexities of modern social media requires an integrated approach combining "pedagogies of play" for experiential skill development with advocacy for structural change (e.g., algorithmic transparency, well being by design principles). This dual strategy empowers individual users to critically engage with digital content while advocating for ethical platform design, thereby safeguarding both mental well-being and democratic discourse. Implications for educators, mental health professionals (including competencies for addressing patient encounters with psychiatric misinformation), policymakers, and platform designers are discussed.

Humans↗
PubMed1995

Position of the American Dietetic Association: food and nutrition misinformation.

Food and nutrition experts, including ADA members, need to take an active role in helping consumers recognize misinformation. The challenge of dealing with food and nutrition misinformation is long-standing and persistent. However, qualified dietetics professionals, in partnership with other members of the health-care team, educators, and representatives of the food industry, can be a forceful voice against food and nutrition misinformation. Qualified dietetics professionals can positively shape the food choices of Americans by collaborating with the media to communicate balanced nutrition information to consumers and to counter misinformation; writing letters to the editors of newspapers and magazines to counter inaccurate and biased articles; calling television and radio shows that interview nutrition extremists and purveyors of misinformation to express their professional concerns; directing the news media and consumers to responsible sources of nutrition information; encouraging researchers to present their results with a balanced perspective; collaborating with the food industry to provide reliable nutrition information; and cooperating with other practitioners to expose emerging misinformation, misbeliefs, frauds, and quackery before they are widely accepted.

Consumer Advocacy↗
PubMed1995

Hindsight bias and the misinformation effect: separating blended recollections from other recollection types.

Questioning the presence of "truly" blended recollections, we investigated two cognitive phenomena: hindsight bias and the misinformation effect. At first glance, both phenomena seem to result from the same interference process, whereby the subsequent encoding of conflicting information impairs the recall of earlier encoded (original) material. Experiment 1 compared both paradigms using numerical items as material: hindsight as well as misinformation subjects revealed the same mean shift in their recollection of the original values. The additional analysis of a multinomial model, however, suggested that blended recollections occurred in the hindsight condition only. The misinformation effect, on the other hand, appeared to be based on averaging across two different recollection types. Experiment 2 further investigated how the memory-trace strength influences the likelihood for blended recollections to occur. In a misinformation procedure, one group of subjects read the original information twice, another group thrice. Again, recollections were similarly shifted towards the misinformation in both groups. But the multinomial model revealed that only the second group (with a stronger memory representation of the original information) showed blended recollections. Taken together, these results suggested that: (1) a minimum memory-trace strength of the original information must be met for blended recollections to occur; and (2) hindsight bias and the misinformation effect--though superficially similar--are induced by different cognitive processes.

Adolescent↗
PubMed1989

Misinformation and memory: the creation of new memories.

Misleading information presented after an event can lead people to erroneous reports of that misinformation. Different process histories can be responsible for the same erroneous report in different people. We argue that the relative proportion of times that the different process histories are responsible for erroneous reporting will depend on the conditions of acquisition, retention, and retrieval of information. Given the conditions typical of most misinformation experiments, it appears that misinformation acceptance plays a major role, memory impairment plays some role, and pure guessing plays little or no role. Moreover, we argue that misinformation acceptance has not received the appreciation that it deserves as a phenomenon worthy of our sustained investigation. It may not tell us anything about impairment of memories, but it does tell us something about the creation of new memories.

Attention↗
PubMed1990

Counteracting nutritional misinformation: a curricular proposal.

Health authorities are concerned about community exposure to nutritional misinformation. Adequate education of health professionals in nutritional matters has been proposed as an important strategy for counteracting such misinformation. This paper provides an example of how the undergraduate chiropractic curriculum may be used to facilitate the development of a framework which enables discrimination between nutritional sense and nonsense. It also discusses how student awareness of discrepancies between personal belief, nutritional science and clinical practice reality may be enhanced.

Ascorbic Acid↗
PubMed1986

Rumor, misinformation and oral contraceptive use in Egypt.

Rumor and misinformation about oral contraceptives continue to prevail in much of Egypt. This study tests the hypothesis that rumor involvement can have a negative and independent impact on pill usage by focusing on a common misbelief that the pill causes 'weakness'. The data comes from a 1981-1982 national self-weighted sample survey of 3283 currently married men and women dealing with family planning and mass media behaviors. The analyses confirm that rumor involvement decreases the probability of current or future pill use by previous users and by those who have never used it. Correct knowledge about the pill is shown to enhance pill usage as do other determinants such as social support for birth control and the desire for no more children. The importance of providing strong contraceptive education programs giving deeper consideration to contraceptive and related health beliefs in delivering fertility regulation services is highlighted.

Adult↗
PubMed1991

Misinformation about medications in rural Ghana.

Misuse of medications is a serious problem in developing countries where drug sales are not regulated. This study assessed drug knowledge and use in a rural Ghanaian town. We surveyed health care workers and a community population sample regarding knowledge and use of available drugs. Although drugs were used by a large percentage of the population, only a small percentage correctly described their recommended use. Doctors and medical assistants were knowledgeable in the correct use of drugs, while chemists were poorly informed. However, the majority of the non-health care worker (NHCW) population bought drugs from chemists without a prescription. We conclude that in this rural setting, chemists contributed to drug misuse by providing misinformation about drugs and selling drugs according to popular demand. Educational programs for chemists and the population regarding drug use and regulation of drug sales by chemists will be critical to drug reform in Ghana.

Adult↗
PubMed1993

Misinformation and warnings in eyewitness testimony: a new testing procedure to differentiate explanations.

Although psychologists agree that the presentation of misleading post-event information often results in errant recollections, there is disagreement about the explanation as to why this occurs. Some (cf. Loftus, Donders, Hoffman, & Schooler, 1989) believe this misinformation alters the memory trace created by the original information, whereas others (cf. McCloskey & Zaragoza, 1985) have argued that the data do not necessitate this explanation. An experiment, designed to differentiate the various explanations, was conducted. Its critical elements were: (1) a condition with a specific warning presented immediately after the misleading information; and (2) a ranking procedure used at testing. The results suggest multiple traces may exist for a limited period, but not indefinitely.

Chi-Square Distribution↗
PubMed1993

The reliability of staging and grading of bladder tumours. Impact of misinformation on the pathologist's diagnosis.

The influence of misinformation on the reliability of the histopathological classification of bladder tumours was analysed. Four consultant pathologists assessed 40 biopsy specimens of bladder tumours staging invasion and grading the specimens according to the Bergkvist classification. A random sample of 20 specimens was accompanied by systematically distorted information ("bias"-unknown to the pathologists) about previous histological grading of the patient (bias group); the other 20 specimens were used as control group (non bias group). After 6 months a second round with the same specimens was arranged to assess the influence of bias on the intraobserver variation. Using kappa (kappa) statistics the chance corrected interobserver agreement rate was poor both in staging of invasion and grading according to the Bergkvist classification (kappa < 0.50). The kappa values in the intraobserver study ranged from poor to excellent with a tendency towards lower kappa when the observer had been biased. The kappa values in the assessment of malignancy were acceptable to excellent. False information did not affect the pathologists' diagnosis significantly.

Biopsy↗
PubMed1995

Misinformation revisited: new evidence on the suggestibility of memory.

In three experiments involving a total of 623 subjects, a series of slides was shown depicting a student in a college bookstore stealing a variety of items. Next, subjects read a narrative describing the event that contained some misinformation and some neutral information about several critical details. Finally, subjects took a memory test. On this test, subjects were asked to list exemplars of 20 specified categories but were instructed not to list any items that they saw in the slide sequence. Analogous to Lindsay's (1990) adaptation of Jacoby, Woloshyn, and Kelley's (1989) "logic-of-opposition" paradigm, the tendency to report suggested details was thus set in opposition to the ability to remember the source of those details. Therefore, we interpreted failure to include suggested details as exemplars as evidence that subjects believed those details had been present in the event. Analysis of subjects' responses under opposition instructions suggests that some misled subjects come to genuinely believe that they saw items that, in reality, were only suggested to them.

Adult↗
PubMed1984

Hepatosplanchnic insulin kinetics in awake endotoxemic Yucatan minipigs: the "misinformed B-cell" hypothesis revisited.

Increased pancreatic insulin secretion may be one of the factors associated with the insulinlike activity (ILA) of endotoxemia. While there is little doubt that the prominent hypoglycemia of endotoxicosis is often preceded by systemic hyperinsulinemia, the cause of this increased secretion and its cause-and-effect relationship to the glucose deficit is less obvious. Recently, a "misinformed B-cell" hypothesis was proposed in which it was suggested that increased glucose flux across the pancreatic B-cell early in endotoxemia might lead to a misinterpretation of the existing glycemic state, resulting in increased insulin release. This possibility was based in part on the observation that increased 6-3H-glucose-derived rates of glucose disappearance (Rd) in endotoxic Yucatan minipigs preceded the onset of systemic hyperinsulinemia. Examination herein of the chronological order of events in this group of pigs and three other groups treated with lidocaine, naloxone, or captopril reveals an increase in pancreatic insulin secretory rate most often before increases in systemic Rd. Each of the three therapies were administered as a primed continuous intravenous infusion, 1 hour after the initiation of a continuous intravenous infusion of Difco 055:B5 E. coli lipopolysaccharide at an LD67 dose of 15 micrograms/kg/hr. In those pigs receiving no therapy, lidocaine, or naloxone, significant increases in pancreatic insulin secretion recurred at 40, 40, and 60 min following the onset of endotoxemia respectively. This was followed in 20 min by the first significant increase in relative glucose disappearance rates (%Rd). Captopril-treated pigs experienced a significant increase in %Rd at 60 min, which was followed in 20 min by a significant increase in pancreatic insulin secretion. In all groups, a significant hyperinsulinemia occurred transiently at 80 min postendotoxin, followed in 20 min by the onset of significant hypoglycemia. These observations suggest that increases in %Rd and transient increases in insulin secretion may be simultaneous events at best, and that along with significant increases in absolute levels of hepatic insulin extraction (observed in all groups at 60 or 80 min postendotoxin) may indicate some local effect of insulin release on hepatic glucose.

Animals↗
PubMed1993

[Misinformation among physicians about dangers of fetal x-ray exposure].

A survey among 20 gynecologists and 86 family physicians and general practitioners revealed that only 46% (70% of the gynecologists and 41% of the others) knew that exposure of a pregnant woman to common diagnostic x-ray is not an indication for therapeutic abortion (the opinion of a consensus of experts). This lack of basic information by those who advise pregnant women points to a serious public health problem. Pregnant women are frightened, and in a sense abortions are "coerced" by increasing the unwarranted anxiety. It is incumbent upon individuals and institutions to ensure that physicians, nurses and others in the health professions be well-informed and not supply misinformation.

Abnormalities, Radiation-Induced↗
PubMedDate not supplied

Misinformation, mistrust, and mistreatment: family planning among Bolivian market women.

Results of an ethnographic study suggest that, despite stereotypes to the contrary, urban Aymara women in Bolivia want to regulate their fertility, and sociocultural norms support fertility regulation. However, the norms also make such regulation difficult to achieve. One barrier is a deep suspicion of modern medicine and medical practitioners, who are not seen as reliable sources of information. This suspicion is reinforced when the quality of health services is inadequate. Among urban Aymara, the level of acceptability of most modern methods of contraception is low. Many would prefer to use traditional methods, even when use of these methods entails considerable sacrifice and risk of conflict with their partners, unwanted pregnancies, and recourse to unsafe abortion.

Abortion, Induced↗
PubMed1990

Total and differential leukocyte counts in clinically well children. Information or misinformation?

To determine whether the total and differential leukocyte count is of value as a case-finding test, we applied the evaluation criteria developed by the US Preventive Services Task Force. The criteria comprise review of the current burden of suffering of the disease to be prevented, the attributes of the intervention to be used, and the quality of the evidence available. A literature search revealed no evidence in the form of data from patients, so a chart review of all complete blood cell counts ordered during a 1-year period by one group of pediatricians was undertaken. At least one value outside of published normal ranges was found on 74.7% of the tests performed on clinically well children. No unsuspected illness was discovered as a result of an abnormal total and differential leukocyte count.

Adolescent↗