School of Communication

: Can Interface Cues Nudge Modeling of Food Consumption?; Following the nudging perspective, this research investigates how technology interface could cue heuristics that influence decisions. A field study showed that interface cues on a food ordering website signaling the amount of food other users consume could trigger an anchoring heuristic and induce individuals to model that amount when deciding their own consumption volume. A laboratory experiment further showed that the anchoring cue tends to induce the modeling behavior of individuals without them being aware of its influence, and such an influence was especially pronounced when resources for cognitive deliberation were limited. Altogether, this research suggests that interface cues could function as nudges and influence decisions at a relatively automatic level. Implications for technology design and intervention are discussed., Keywords: interface cues, nudge, anchoring heuristic, salience, modeling of food consumption, depletion

: Countering Craving with Disgust Images; There is a lack of research examining whether smoking cues in anti-tobacco advertisements elicit cravings, or whether this effect is moderated by countervailing message attributes, such as disgusting images. Furthermore, no research has examined how these types of messages influence nicotine withdrawn smokers' cognitive processing and associated behavioral intentions. At a laboratory session, participants (N = 50 nicotine-deprived adults) were tested for cognitive processing and recognition memory of 12 anti-tobacco advertisements varying in depictions of smoking cues and disgust content. Self-report smoking urges and intentions to quit smoking were measured after each message. The results from this experiment indicated that smoking cue messages activated appetitive/approach motivation resulting in enhanced attention and memory, but increased craving and reduced quit intentions. Disgust messages also enhanced attention and memory, but activated aversive/avoid motivation resulting in reduced craving and increased quit intentions. The combination of smoking cues and disgust content resulted in moderate amounts of craving and quit intentions, but also led to heart rate acceleration (indicating defensive processing) and poorer recognition of message content. These data suggest that in order to counter nicotine-deprived smokers' craving and prolong abstinence, anti-tobacco messages should omit smoking cues but include disgust. Theoretical implications are also discussed., Grant Number: T32 AA007474, Publication Note: This NIH-funded author manuscript originally appeared in PubMed Central at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5451094.

: Enriching consumer health vocabulary through mining a social Q&A site; The widely known vocabulary gap between health consumers and healthcare professionals hinders information seeking and health dialogue of consumers on end-user health applications. The Open Access and Collaborative Consumer Health Vocabulary (OAC CHV), which contains health-related terms used by lay consumers, has been created to bridge such a gap. Specifically, the OAC CHV facilitates consumers' health information retrieval by enabling consumer-facing health applications to translate between professional language and consumer friendly language. To keep up with the constantly evolving medical knowledge and language use, new terms need to be identified and added to the OAC CHV. User-generated content on social media, including social question and answer (social Q&A) sites, afford us an enormous opportunity in mining consumer health terms. Existing methods of identifying new consumer terms from text typically use ad-hoc lexical syntactic patterns and human review. Our study extends an existing method by extracting n-grams from a social Q&A textual corpus and representing them with a rich set of contextual and syntactic features. Using K-means clustering, our method, simiTerm, was able to identify terms that are both contextually and syntactically similar to the existing OAC CHV terms. We tested our method on social Q&A corpora on two disease domains: diabetes and cancer. Our method outperformed three baseline ranking methods. A post-hoc qualitative evaluation by human experts further validated that our method can effectively identify meaningful new consumer terms on social Q&A., Keywords: Consumer health information, Consumer health vocabulary, Controlled vocabularies, Ontology enrichment, Social Q&A, Grant Number: UL1 TR001427, Publication Note: This NIH-funded author manuscript originally appeared in PubMed Central at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5488691.

: Global Capital, Global Labour And Global Dominance; This article analyses the movie, xXx: Return of Xander Cage, produced to attract global audiences and increase global investments in Hollywood, by examining its production, financing, marketing and distribution practices. The aim of this article is to point to a shift in the way in which global Hollywood operates, exploits and maintains its economic and cultural dominance. It explores Return of Xander Cage as a case study of how particular Hollywood films are now being produced for the influential Chinese and Indian markets by using the resources of the target nations to counter competition from these same markets., Keywords: China, media, India, global Hollywood, political economy of film, production, promotion and distribution of films, star system, targeted global blockbuster, Publication Note: The publisher's version of record is available at https://doi.org/10.1386/macp.15.1.27_1

: Reading on Paper and Screen among Senior Adults; While the senior population has been increasingly engaged with reading on mobile technologies, research that specifically documents the impact of technologies on reading for this age group has still been lacking. The present study investigated how different reading media (screen versus paper) might result in different reading outcomes among older adults due to both cognitive and psychological factors. Using a laboratory experiment with 81participants aged 57 to 85, our results supported past research and showed the influence of cognitive map formation on readers' feelings of fatigue. We contributed empirical evidence to the contention that reading on a screen could match that of reading from paper if the presentation of the text on screen resemble that of the print. Our findings also suggested that individual levels of technophobia was an important barrier to older adults' effective use of mobile technologies for reading. In the analyses, we further showed that technophobia was correlated with technology experience, certain personality traits, and age. The present study highlights the importance of providing tailored support that helps older adults overcome psychological obstacles in using technologies., Keywords: Cognitive map, Mobile technology, Older adults, Reading, Technophobia, Publication Note: This NIH-funded author manuscript originally appeared in PubMed Central at https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5742182.

: Systematic Review Of The Information And Communication Technology Features Of Web- And Mobile-based Psychoeducational Interventions For Depression; Objective: To examine the information and communication technology (ICT) features of psychoeducational interventions for depression delivered via the Internet or via mobile technology. Methods: Web- and mobile-based psychoeducational intervention studies published from 2004 to 2014 were selected and reviewed by two independent coders. Results: A total of 55 unique studies satisfied the selection criteria. The review revealed a diverse range of ICTs used to support the psychoeducational programs. Most interventions used websites as their main mode of delivery and reported greater use of communication tools compared to effective approaches like tailoring or interactive technologies games, videos, and self-monitoring tools. Many of the studies relied on medium levels of clinician involvement and only a few were entirely self-guided. Conclusion: Programs that reported higher levels of clinician involvement also reported using more communication tools, and reported greater compliance to treatment. Future experimental studies may help unpack the effects of technology features and reveal new ways to automate aspects of clinician input. Practical implications: There is a need to further examine ways ICTs can be optimized to reduce the burden on clinicians whilst enhancing the delivery of proven effective therapeutic approaches. (C) 2017 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved., Keywords: cognitive-behavioral therapy, randomized controlled-trial, Depression, brief advice, Communication technology, controlled clinical-trial, follow-up, health interventions, internet-based treatment, Mobile, primary-care, Psychoeducation, self-help intervention, university-students, Web-based, Publication Note: The publisher's version of record is available at https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pec.2017.01.004

: “A Finer Type of Radio”; This manuscript examines the efficacy of the Women’s National Radio Committee (WNRC) and its influence on the radio industry in the mid-1930s. For the WNRC, giving awards to model programming was more effective to encourage change than merely complaining. As such, one of its most significant contributions was its annual radio awards ceremonies. The WNRC also attempted to distance itself from the caricatures of clubwomen and reformers to make the group more acceptable to radiomen. Once the WNRC asserted its influence in a way that industry executives could not control, they attempted—with some success—to contain the group’s power., Radio Industry, Women’s Clubs, Women’s National Radio Committee, Broadcasting, Radio programming, This is the accepted manuscript and the version of record can be found at https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2019.1620562

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School of Communication