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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. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using social media for the purpose of disseminating mental health information is a critical area of scientific inquiry for health communication professionals. The purpose of this study was to investigate whether the presence of a first-person testimonial in educational mental health information placed in Facebook and Twitter messages influenced college students’ (N = 257) source perceptions, information processing, cognitive elaboration, health information recall, beliefs, and behavioral intentions. Results show that exposure to social media messages that featured mental health information embedded with a testimonial predicted less source homophily and more critical thoughts about the social media source, less systematic message processing, and less cognitive elaboration. Health information recall was significantly impacted by both the social media platform and message content such that participants in the testimonial condition on Facebook were more likely to recall the health facts in those messages whereas participants who viewed the testimonial in Twitter were less likely to recall the facts in those tweets. Compared to those who read Facebook messages, participants who read Twitter messages reported higher levels of systematic message processing. These findings suggest that the integration of health testimonials into social media messages might inadvertently provoke psychological resistance to mental health information, thereby reducing the persuasive impact of those messages. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Achieving a more sophisticated understanding of narrative persuasion requires an examination of how the experience of narrative involvement influences persuasive resistance. In this study, we used a multiple message design approach to test two models of narrative involvement, one with transportation and the other with narrative engagement, with programs featuring persuasive stories about sexual and reproductive topics from primetime television. Although both transportation and the narrative engagement influenced processes related to changes in participants’ (N= 362) beliefs, attitudes, and behavioral intentions, the two scales influenced different cognitive and affective responses to the narratives. Transportation was positively related to enjoyment and the perception that the narrative topic was personally relevant. Narrative engagement predicted enjoyment and reduced reactance. Neither transportation nor narrative engagement significantly influenced cognitive elaboration or counterarguments, based on the application of a thought-listing procedure designed to measure counterarguments related to the realism of the narratives. Put together, these findings suggest that the study of narrative persuasion necessitates the use of different measurement instruments that can adequately assess the multidimensional nature and influence of narrative involvement. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The present article contributes to the growing corpus of scholarship that seeks to shed light on how the entertainment-education (EE) strategy can be implemented and evaluated across diverse media platforms. Because a transmedia approach to storytelling is a natural, albeit an understudied extension of the EE strategy, the researchers investigate how involvement with one interactive storytelling format, flash games, influences audience involvement and message outcomes. The researchers’ evaluation of audience involvement with an interactive narrative in a flash game, designed as one element of a national transmedia campaign to increase milk consumption, demonstrated that narrative understanding was related to participants’ (N=157) experiences of feeling involved with the game (i.e., transportation), although significant changes in message-related beliefs, attitudes and behavioural intentions were not related to transportation. Transportation was positively related to enjoyment of the game, but frustration with gaming challenges negatively influenced transportation and enjoyment. This study illustrates the need for further investigation of involvement with stories in interactive media platforms, and, most importantly, the continued exploration of the strengths and limitations associated with incorporating transmedia storytelling elements into EE campaigns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Approximately 20 million people in the United States have genital human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection linked to cancer. We examined the news information presented about the HPV vaccine in major U.S. newspapers over the 19 months following its Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. To answer the question of how news information is presented in ways that might influence public health, we explored the frequency of cancer prevention and sexually transmitted infection prevention message frames used to describe the HPV vaccine, the extent to which journalists relied on official sources, and the presence of personal examples. A content analysis of 547 newspaper articles revealed that less than half of the articles provided detailed health information. Of the articles that contained a message frame, cancer prevention was most frequently employed. Government/political sources, medical doctors, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were the most commonly cited sources. Finally, we found that only 16% of all the articles we sampled featured personal accounts. Together, our findings suggest that U.S. newspaper coverage lacked detailed information about both HPV and the HPV vaccine in spite of federal approval of the vaccine, legal mandates for the vaccine, and a widespread information campaign. Implications for public health are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]