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Drawing upon construal level theory and regulatory fit literature, this research examined the effect of fit between humor and regulatory focus on audience engagement with health information on social media. The results of two studies showed that incongruity humor (vs. aggressive humor) induced greater social proximity between the source and the viewer, and humor type interacted with regulatory focus of a message to impact audience engagement. Specifically, incongruity humor paired with a prevention-focused message (vs. a promotion-focused message) resulted in greater content endorsement and health information engagement, whereas aggressive humor combined with a promotion-focused message (vs. a prevention-focused message) led to greater content endorsement. Results further identified processing fluency as a mediator of the fit effect on audience engagement. This research offers important theoretical and practical implications for public health interventions on social media. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Women experiencing postpartum depression (PPD) often face the debilitating symptoms of depression as well as the stigmatization associated with having a mental health crisis during motherhood. Accordingly, there have been numerous calls for theoretical-based approaches to reduce the stigma and promote social support for women with PPD. Guided by stigma research, anthropomorphism literature, and attribution theory, this research explored the effect of PPD anthropomorphism (i.e., imbuing humanlike intentions and characteristics to PPD) on perceived controllability, sympathy, anger toward PPD, and willingness to provide social support (WPSS). Results of three studies revealed that humanizing PPD led to decreased perceived controllability attributed to women with PPD, resulting in increased sympathy, more anger toward PPD, and consequently, greater WPSS. This research contributes to the extant health communication literature, particularly in the realm of mental health stigma, by addressing how humanizing risk-bearing entities affects individuals’ mental health related perceptions and decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Guided by ad-content congruence literature, arousal-biased competition (ABC) model, and motivated cognition framework, this research examined the effectiveness of peripherally placed advertising in online video content. Specifically, two studies were conducted to explore the interplay between arousal generated from the contextual video and thematic ad-content congruence on ad memory and evaluation of in-video overlay advertisements. Results revealed that in a calm context, thematic incongruence was associated with better encoding and storage of ad information but no differences in ad attitudes or purchase intentions, whereas in an arousing context, thematically congruent ads (vs. incongruent ads) led to better encoding and storage, as well as greater processing fluency, which, in turn, resulted in more favorable ad attitudes and greater purchase intentions. Theoretical and practical implications are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined how humor (incongruity humor vs. no humor) interacts with individual differences in perceived efficacy to influence health attitudes and behavioral intentions. Results of a controlled experiment (N = 294) revealed that among individuals with lower levels of perceived efficacy, incongruity humor, relative to no humor condition, resulted in greater source liking, which in turn, enhanced their attitudes and intentions to perform preventive health behaviors. However, for individuals higher in perceived efficacy, incongruity humor (vs. no humor) had an indirect negative effect on intentions via decreased attitudes. Theoretical and practical implications of these findings are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many scientific societies have emphasized the importance of evaluating the clinical utility of reproductive carrier screening (RCS). This systematic review aims to assess the clinical utility of RCS and synthesize the outcomes in a meta-analysis. A total of eleven studies were included. The number of conditions screened in the studies varied from three to 176 and led to the identification of one to 24 high-risk couples (HRCs) per 1,000 screened individuals. Pooled estimations were as follows: the prenatal diagnosis (PND) rate among pregnant HRCs 0.644 (95% CI = 0.364, 0.923), the termination rate among affected pregnancies 0.714 (95% CI = 0.524, 0.904), and the rate of in-vitro fertilization (IVF) with preimplantation genetic testing (PGT) 0.631 (95% CI = 0.538, 0.725). There is a statistically significant decrease in the rates of undertaking PND and termination as the number of screened conditions increases. Carriers of conditions classified as having a more severe impact were found to be more likely to choose termination or IVF with PGT. Our review suggests that the number and the severity of screened conditions can significantly impact HRCs' reproductive decisions. Future work needs to investigate the definition of clinical utility and the design of screening panels. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Autosomal recessive (AR) and x-linked (XL) conditions are rare but collectively common which impact millions of people globally on morbidity, mortality and costs. Advanced medical technologies allow prospective parents to make informed reproductive decisions to avoid having affected children. Economic evaluations targeting on reproductive carrier screening (RCS) for AR and/or XL conditions have been conducted, but there has not been a systematic review in this area. A systematic search of economic evaluations for RCS was undertaken using the following databases – EMBASE, MEDLINE and SCOPUS. The search strategy was designed to capture full economic evaluations related to RCS since 1990. This review followed the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analysis (PRISMA) strategy. The included 23 studies adopted various types of methodologies to conduct economic evaluations. The majority of studies examined a single condition. The various clinical strategies and screened conditions caused the different cost-effectiveness conclusions in the published studies. Establishing a validated and practical clinical strategy of RCS and investigating the cost-effectiveness of multiple conditions in one economic evaluation are critical for implementing RCS in the future. Further economic evaluations are essential to provide evidence-based practice for decision-makers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study combined theory from the fields of communication, behavioral ecology, and ecological psychology to examine how relevant factors about food influence the timing and trajectory of our decision-making after exposure to food advertisements. Young healthy adult participants (N = 108) completed a forced-choice, speeded decision-making latency task before and after viewing a set of advertisements. Results suggested that participants were more appetitively motivated by more energy-dense foods (i.e., higher calorie per gram) using direct food cues (i.e., were directly available to the senses, were visible), but after exposure to advertisements, this predisposition was less pronounced. Advertisement food cues were also important in decision-making, especially in coalition with the food cues used in the decision-making task stimuli. This study supports an optimal foraging perspective being expanded to human behavioral contexts in a modern landscape. Food advertising and packaging cues interacted with energy density level of food to provide information relevant to biological imperatives, which significantly altered food consumption decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Inkjet 3D printing is becoming one of the most disruptive additive manufacturing technologies, due to its unique capability of precisely depositing micro-droplets of multi-functional materials. It has found widespread industrial applications in aerospace, energy and health areas by processing multi-functional metal-materials, nano-materials, and bio-materials. However, the current inkjet 3D printing system still suffers from a low production quality issue, due to low process reliability caused by the complex and dynamic droplet dispensing behavior. Due to the challenges in terms of efficiency, accuracy, and versatility, robust droplet monitoring and process inspection tools are still largely unavailable. To this end, a novel catadioptric stereo system is proposed for online droplet monitoring in an inkjet 3D printing process. In this system, a regular industrial CCD camera is coupled with a flat mirror and magnification lens system to capture the tiny droplet images to detect the droplet location in 3D space. A mathematical model is formulated to calculate the droplet location in 3D world space from 2D image space. A holistic hardware and software framework is constructed to evaluate the performance of the proposed system in terms of resolution, accuracy, efficiency, and versatility, both theoretically and experimentally. The results show that the proposed catadioptric stereo system can achieve single micron resolution and accuracy, which is one-order-of-magnitude higher than the 3D printing system itself. The proposed droplet location detection algorithm has low time complexity, and the detection efficiency can meet the online monitoring requirement. Multi-facet features including the droplet location and speed can be effectively detected by the presented technique. The proposed catadioptric stereo system is a promising online droplet monitoring tool and has tremendous potential to enable trustworthy quality assurance in inkjet 3D printing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception of party polarization has a positive impact on political participation. While past research suggests that such impact depends upon people’s information use, empirical evidence is lacking. We used a mediated moderation model to test the multiplicative effect between polarization perception and media use on political participation. The data for analysis came from a survey of 625 representative Hong Kong residents in 2015. Findings show that the impact of perceived party polarization on political participation is contingent upon one’s news attentiveness, and that internal political efficacy serves as a mediator that partially explains the interaction effect. Narrowed gaps in political knowledge, efficacy, and participation were observed between light and heavy news users as perceived party polarization rises. The implications of the findings with respect to political participation, role of news media use, and the formation of efficacy beliefs in the context of party polarization are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined individuals' physiological and cognitive responses to different types of emotionally experienced content located in obesity prevention fear appeals. Results suggested that experienced valence impacted individuals' attention and memory as a function of experienced arousal level. Local content that created coactive highly arousing experiences received the most attention, though visual recognition suggested these messages were more difficult to encode. Local content that created negative moderately arousing experiences was best encoded. Global message evaluation data suggest that moderately arousing messages with a change in experienced valence may prove to be most effective, as they ensure attention and good memory while keeping high self-reported interest, and a high level of perceived severity of obesity. Implications and suggestions for future research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the processing of primary biologically motivating content commonly found in popular music videos—sex and violence—from a motivated cognition perspective (Lang, 2006, 2009). Participants (N = 68) were presented with music videos containing different combinations of primary biologically motivating content (i.e., sex, violence, both, neither). Secondary task reaction times were used to index resources available for encoding and a visual recognition task was applied to measure memory. The results indicate that music videos that contained both sex and violence provided the most engaging and memorable experiences, potentially even flow experiences. Implications for processing these types of information in these ways are discussed and future research is suggested. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Environmental corporate social responsibility (CSR) has been a popular practice among corporations. However, the mechanism and effectiveness of environmental CSR in affecting corporate–public communication are still unclear. Against the theoretical backdrop of the ‘halo effect’ and through a controlled experiment with 742 participants from Hong Kong and mainland China, we find that: if a company’s environmental CSR activity receives higher support from the consumers, it is less likely for consumers to avoid advertisements endorsed by the company. The CSR green halo effect therefore exists. Moreover, consumers’ nationality and their three preexisting attitudes (general environmental CSR support, environmental beliefs, and favorability of products’ country of origin) are important moderators of the green halo effect and need to be considered in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Gansu wapiti (Cervus elaphus kansuensis) is one of eight subspecies of wapiti in China, which has been placed under the second-ranked protected animals by Chinese government. No complete mitochondrial genomes of Gansu wapiti was determined until now, so the phylogenetic relationships among the subspecies of wapiti and other species of the genus Cervus have not been well studied. In this study, the complete mitochondrial genome of C. e. kansuensis was first sequenced and characterized. The genome is 16,430 bp in length, containing 13 protein-coding genes (PCGs), 22 transfer RNA (tRNA) genes, two ribosomal RNA (rRNA) genes, and one noncoding control region (CR). Maximum-Likelihood (ML) and Bayesian Inference (BI) trees based on the 13 PCGs show that C. e. kansuensis is clustered with other wapiti subspecies in China except for C. e. yarkandensis. It is also shown that Cervus elaphus is not a monophyletic group. This study provides important molecular evidence for the phylogenetic relationship among species in the genus Cervus. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study extends the spiral silence theory and investigates the influence of perceived incongruence in opinion climate on individuals' intentions to express their true thoughts. Three intervening variables were examined to explain the process by which perceived incongruence in opinion climate leads to self-censorship: ambivalence, perceived opinion support, and internet political efficacy. Using data collected in telephone interviews with a random sample of 1020 Chinese residents in Shanghai and Guangzhou, we found that individual perceptions of the opinion climate varied considerably, and they were based on different media outlets. The Chinese audience is able to tell the difference between traditional media and the internet in terms of the features of their content. Moreover, among the Guangzhou residents, we found that the perceived incongruence in opinion climate was negatively related to the individual's willingness to express his or her true thoughts. Perceived opinion support was found the most robust intervening variable among the three proposed mediators. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]