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As the tenor of climate change debates continues to intensify, it is critical to understand how shifts in style and target affect individuals’ proenvironmental behaviors. Using two online experiments, we investigated how these changes can violate expectations in ways that affect persuasive power. The results suggest that an aggressive style is likely to expectancy violation, which negatively affects individuals’ private- and public-sphere behavioral intentions. Differences in the framing of responsibility between individuals and institutions had limited impacts. The findings offer insights and practical implications for environmental communicators on how communication styles and framing affect efforts to shift climate change behaviors.

Given the prosocial nature of COVID-19 mitigation actions, the norm activation model (NAM) provides a theoretical framework to understand how these mitigation behaviors may be driven by activating personal norms. Aimed at delineating the relationship between awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility, two key variables in the model, the present study examined to what extent this relationship was moderated by political ideology, individual efficacy, and collective efficacy.A cross-sectional online survey (N = 560) was implemented with a sample that matched the demographics of the national population in the U.S.The relationship between awareness of consequences and ascription of responsibility was stronger among liberals and those reporting low levels of individual efficacy and collective efficacy.Health behaviors such as COVID-19 mitigation actions can be motivated by activating individuals' sense of moral obligation, but the effectiveness of this approach depends on their political ideology and efficacy beliefs.Campaigns can promote health behaviors by triggering the moral responsibility of the target audience through emphasizing severity of the consequences. This approach can be more effective for liberals and those that lack confidence in individual and collective abilities to avert the threat.

The current study investigated how individuals process aggressive and humorous video messages communicating childhood vaccination and climate change. Employing psychological reactance, message discounting and expectancy violation, we built a theoretical model that explains the effects of communication styles on individuals’ activism intentions. Two online experiments in the United States ( N = 441 and N = 533) using self-created videos on the topics of childhood vaccination and climate change were conducted to examine this model. The results showed that both perceived aggressiveness and humorousness of the videos led to higher message discounting, which then resulted in stronger activism intentions. Perceived aggressiveness led to higher expectancy violation, while perceived humorousness led to lower expectancy violation, which negatively affected activism intentions. The role played by psychological reactance was inconsistent across the two contexts. The findings provide theoretical implications for understanding how individuals process aggressive and humorous communication styles, especially in relation to discussions on science issues.

Objective This study explored the effects of COVID-19 vaccine promotion messages highlighting the benefit at individual, community, and country levels. Based on the cultural theory of risks, we investigated how individuals’ valuation of individualism vs. communitarianism and hierarchical vs. egalitarian social structure affect their responses to vaccine messages. Methods An online experiment (N = 702) with four video message conditions (individual-centered, community-centered, country-centered, and no message) was conducted. Participants were asked about their cultural cognition worldview, then were randomly assigned to view one message. Participants also reported their willingness to receive COVID-19 vaccines and support for vaccine mandate. Results Respondents were more likely to get vaccinated and support vaccine mandates after viewing an individual-centered message, less with a community-centered message. Individuals who value individualism were more likely to respond positively to individual-centered messages, but those who believe more in communitarianism value were less likely. Conclusion Results showed that individuals are motivated selectively to respond to certain claims that cohere with their worldview and therefore respond differently to vaccine benefit frames. Practice Implications The results point to the importance of understanding audiences’ worldviews. By identifying this process through hierarchical and individualistic values, properly designed health promotion messages can maximize the desired outcomes.

Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) pose a great threat to human health and ecological system safety. The interception of nitrogen is common found in the riparian zone. However, there is no evidence on how nitrogen addition affects the anaerobic degradation of PAHs in soil of the water-level-fluctuation zone (WLFZ) of the Three Gorges Reservoir (TGR) in Yangtze River, China. Here, we investigated the PAHs degradation rate, the variation of key functional genes and microbial communities after nitrogen addition in soil that experienced a flooding period of water-level-fluctuation. The results revealed that the ∑16PAHs were decreased 16.19 %-36.65 % and more 3-5-rings PAHs were biodegraded with nitrogen addition in WLFZ. The most genes involved in PAHs-anaerobic degradation and denitrification were up-regulated by nitrate addition, and phyla Firmicutes, Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria were more advantages in nitrogen addition groups. The Tax4Fun based genome function analysis revealed that the microbial activity of PAHs-degradation increased with nitrate addition. The co-occurrence network analysis indicated that nitrogen addition accelerated the metabolism of nitrogen and PAHs. It is the first time to provide the direct experimental evidences that nitrogen transformation in the WLFZ soil promotes anaerobic PAHs degradation. This work is of importance to understand the effect of nitrogen intercepted in the WLFZ soil of TGR in Yangtze River, China.

Building upon recent theoretical perspectives on emotional flow and the dynamic nature of fear appeals specifically, this study examined the sequencing effects of the emotions (i.e., fear and hope) induced from a fear appeal on persuasion in the context of MMR vaccination. Specifically, an experiment (