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This meta-analysis integrates 47 empirical studies, comprising 89,826 participants from 21 countries, to examine the cumulative effects and potential moderators of exposure to COVID-19 news and information on attendant emotions, appraisals, and behaviors. Overall media exposure indicated only small positive effect sizes on adverse psychological reactions, though it was moderately and positively associated with disease concern and preventive measures. Social media exposure was associated with all these responses, but traditional news media exposure was only associated with disease concern. The associations between overall media exposure and adverse psychological reactions were moderated by COVID-19 experience, healthcare profession, and country type.

This study investigates the contextual and relational characteristics that underlie people’s information and communication technology (ICT) use and the implications for their well-being. We contextualize this investigation according to migrants, because they are faced with disruptions to their personal networks in the migration process that may attenuate the availability of social support and negatively affect their mental health. Migrants tend to be proficient in using mobile ICT to connect with different social ties to fulfill their needs, which potentially makes a difference to their psychological well-being. Through a survey of 504 internal migrant workers in China, we examined the social network factors that underlie multiple mobile ICT use and the attendant influences on social support and psychological well-being. Redressing the overemphasis on the importance of strong ties in extant literature, this study highlights the salience of mobile media multiplexity (i.e., the use of multiple mobile communication channels for social interactions) in weak tie communication and the greater contribution of weak ties toward social support and psychological well-being than strong ties. Our findings suggest that mobile-mediated communicative relationships with newer and more distanced social connections outside their immediate circles enhance the well-being of migrants. We contend that media multiplexity vis-à-vis weak ties underscores the reconfiguration of migrants’ communicative relationships following the separation from original ties and facilitates rewarding interactions with new ties.

The emergence of mental distress presents significant difficulties and dilemmas for adolescents and early adults about being open with their troubles and emotions. To better understand the communication practices and challenges that reflect the lived realities of marginalized youth struggling with mental health disruption, this study examines 136 anonymous personal stories disclosing self-harm behaviors or suicidal thoughts on a Facebook "secrets" page for Hong Kong students. The narrative analysis unveils young people's anecdotal accounts of hidden grievances and struggles around their mental distress, hitherto untold not because they are too difficult to tell but because they are too negative to be heard. Extending the concept of tellability, this study illustrates how anonymous distress storytelling on social media enables silenced and isolated distressed youth to resist the denial - invisibility, discredit, and mischaracterization - of their suffering by turning their disruptive experiences into stories worth telling through disclosure, clarification, and testimony. This study further clarifies the salient interpretive frameworks that shape young people's experience and communication of mental distress: the tyranny of happiness depicted to engender distress and languages of suffering used to resist culpability and plead for social respite. It highlights the disconnection in interpretations regarding the transitory nature of distress and its controllability as a major source of communication gap and interpersonal communication breakdowns. The findings call on health communication practices around mental health promotion to refrain from highlighting individual deficiencies or messages of positivity and speak out on the structural inconsistencies and communication denial that perpetuate and silence youth distress.

The question of how patient-provider communication affects health outcomes has been a longstanding concern for health communication scholarship and practice. As patient-provider communication becomes increasingly mediated by digital technologies, much research has sought to compare online patient-provider communication (OPPC) with that conducted in-person, weighing its relative merits against its costs and barriers. This line of inquiry has mostly focused on the comparative benefits of OPPC for service delivery with little attempt to link these benefits to the wider health implications of OPPC. Consequently, the mechanisms that explain the impacts of OPPC on patients' overall wellbeing have been underexamined. Through a survey of 681 participants in China, this study examined the direct and indirect pathways between OPPC and quality of life (i.e., sleep, exercise, social activities, and psychological wellbeing). Our results demonstrate statistically significant direct relationships between OPPC and the four quality-of-life constructs examined as well as the mediation effects of patient-centered care and health competence in these relationships. The findings call for greater attention to the longer-term contributions of OPPC in empowering patients, especially those who are underserved by the healthcare system.

Social media have been widely credited for facilitating young people’s political engagement, most notably by providing a conducive platform for political expression. There has been comparatively li...

Purpose To better understand executive communication on social media, the purpose of this paper is to examine the pattern of messages posted by chief executive officers (CEOs) on Twitter and their retweetability (rate of reposting by other users). Design/methodology/approach The study data comprises 1,068 original tweets randomly selected from all Fortune 1000 CEOs’ tweets in 2014. The impact of the contextual factors (industry background, activeness, and Twitter age) and content factors (content types, supplementary information, and linguistic features) on retweetability was examined through regression analyses. Findings CEOs tweet to share information and insights, to promote their companies or products, to update work or life status, and to interact with the public. Original insights, promotional messages, and seasonal greetings were most likely to be retweeted. CEOs’ backgrounds, usage of hashtags, and certainty of language were also positively associated with retweetability. Practical implications CEOs may enhance their online social influence through demonstrating leadership by sharing insights about their organization or industry and posting topical messages (e.g. season’s greetings). Furthermore, CEOs could use hashtags strategically to initiate or participate in discussions and promote their personal visibility. Originality/value This study is one of the first to evaluate how leaders of the largest companies in the USA communicate on Twitter. It contributes to a theoretical understanding of the factors underlying online influence – the influence of the status of the online communicator vs the message content on information forwarding.

Mobile dating apps with geolocation function have gained popularity for fostering social, romantic, and sexual connections between nearby strangers. Through in-depth interviews and focus-group disc...

Aims: Cigarette passing and sharing contribute to early smoking onset among Chinese male youth. Refusal efficacy, considered pivotal in smoking prevention, has not been addressed in published resea...

In this study, we examine the health disparities of sexual minority women by surveying 310 lesbian, bisexual, and queer/questioning women (LBQW) in China about their breast health and cancer screening practices. We found that Chinese LBQW, particularly those identified with a masculine gender role and practice chest binding, are vulnerable to breast cancer given their high rates of behavioral risk factors (e.g., cigarette smoking) and symptoms (e.g., breast lumps) but low rates of self and clinical breast examinations. Salient barrier (stigma) and facilitators (social support availability, self-efficacy, and breast cancer information exposure) of breast cancer screening were also identified.

In 2006, a video of a middle-aged man verbally assaulting a youth in a public bus thrust user-generated content (UGC) and YouTube into the public imagination in Hong Kong. Using the concept of legitimacy from institutional theory to qualitatively analyze newspaper commentaries about the incident, this study connects journalists’ narratives to the diffusion of UGC by showing how they inadvertently promote cultural support and normative acceptance of this new media category as a consequence of efforts at paradigm-repair and boundary maintenance. Those narratives construe UGC as a legitimate coin-of-exchange: something relevant, familiar, interesting, and appropriate to engage with.

We study the distribution of ages in the mean field forest fire model introduced by R\'ath and T\'oth. This model is an evolving random graph whose dynamics combine Erd\H{o}s-R\'enyi edge-addition with a Poisson rain of lightning strikes. All edges in a connected component are deleted when any of its vertices is struck by lightning. We consider the asymptotic regime of lightning rates for which the model displays self-organized criticality. The age of a vertex increases at unit rate, but it is reset to zero at each burning time. We show that the empirical age distribution converges as a process to a deterministic solution of an autonomous measure-valued differential equation. The main technique is to observe that, conditioned on the vertex ages, the graph is an inhomogeneous random graph in the sense of Bollob\'as, Janson and Riordan. We then study the evolution of the ages via the multitype Galton--Watson trees that arise as the limit in law of the component of an identified vertex at any fixed time. These trees are critical from the gelation time onwards., Comment: 61 pages, minor revisions compared to v2

Let $F(N,m)$ denote a random forest on a set of $N$ vertices, chosen uniformly from all forests with $m$ edges. Let $F(N,p)$ denote the forest obtained by conditioning the Erdos-Renyi graph $G(N,p)$ to be acyclic. We describe scaling limits for the largest components of $F(N,p)$ and $F(N,m)$, in the critical window $p=N^{-1}+O(N^{-4/3})$ or $m=N/2+O(N^{2/3})$. Aldous described a scaling limit for the largest components of $G(N,p)$ within the critical window in terms of the excursion lengths of a reflected Brownian motion with time-dependent drift. Our scaling limit for critical random forests is of a similar nature, but now based on a reflected diffusion whose drift depends on space as well as on time.

Social media have been widely credited for facilitating young people's political engagement, most notably by providing a platform which is conducive for political expression. There has been little attention, however, to the possible pitfalls for young people in engaging with politics on social media. Through in-depth interviews, this study presents the paradoxical case of a group of politically active youths who have no qualms with participating in an offline large-scale protest but are wary of publicly engaging with politics on social media. The findings indicate that perceptions of hostility, social risk, and futility impede online political expressions while the promises of embodied experience draw participants toward offline participation. Rather than disengage with politics completely on social media, the young people in this study adopt certain "disconnective practices"---selected functions, audiences, and apps---to manage their relationships with others in their social networks who may or may not share their political views.

Previous studies have examined the role of personal networks, social capital, and social support in one's subjective well-being. However, there is a dearth of research on how personal networks are constructed by multimodal media use, and in turn, influence individuals' well-being alongside other factors. This study examines Chinese internal migrant workers who exhibit dynamic network characteristics owing to their mobility. Through a survey of 504 Chinese internal migrant workers, this study found that WeChat and mobile phone calling intensity predicted bonding social capital, while bridging social capital was predicted only by QQ intensity. Two dimensions of personal networks ---density and weighted tie multimodal connectedness (WTMC) -- explained migrant workers' well-being. Notably, perceived social support consistently predicted well-being outcomes and played a mediating role between tie proximity and well-being. Importantly, bridging social capital and weak-tie in the personal network were found to be strong and significant predictors of well-being, indicating migrant workers' weak-tie support preference. The results provide a clearer understanding of the role of diverse media use in one's personal network, and attendant influence on one's social capital, social support, and well-being related outcomes.

This study examined attitudes about social acceptance, discrimination protection, and marriage equality for gay/lesbian people with a representative sample of 1,008 Hong Kong Chinese adults via a telephone survey. Despite majority endorsement of homosexuality (52.29% positive vs. 34.12% negative) and discrimination protection (50.72% favorable vs. 14.64% opposed), attitudes toward same-sex marriage diverged (32.79% favorable vs. 39.41% opposed). There was a sharp distinction in accepting gay/lesbian people as co-workers (83.57%) and friends (76.92%) versus relatives (40.19%). Having more homosexual/bisexual friends or co-workers contributed to greater endorsement of social acceptance and discrimination protection but not same-sex marriage. Age, religion, political orientation, and homonegativity consistently predicted attitudes toward social acceptance, discrimination protection, and same-sex marriage, whereas gender-role beliefs, conformity to norms, and cultural orientations had varying impacts. This article informs theory and advocacy by disentangling homonegativity from attitudes about gay/lesbian issues and highlighting the centrality of family-kinship and relative-outsider delineation in Chinese societies.

HIV-related stigma in the wider community compounds the suffering of people living with HIV (PLWH) and hampers effective HIV prevention and care. This study examines the level of public stigma toward PLWH in Hong Kong and associated social-cultural factors. A telephone survey was conducted in June-July 2016 with 1080 Chinese adults aged 18-94 randomly selected from the general population. The results indicate substantial degree of public stigma toward PLWH. Overall, 58.1% of the participants endorsed at least one statement indicating negative social judgment of PLWH. Over 40% attributed HIV infections to irresponsible behaviors and nearly 30% perceived most PLWH as promiscuous. About 20% considered HIV to be a punishment for bad behavior and believed that PLWH should feel ashamed of themselves. These statistics indicate that HIV-related stigma among the general Hong Kong population had no noticeable reduction in a decade but is lower than that among rural and urban populations in China. Our findings suggest that the lower stigma in Hong Kong may be linked to higher education levels rather than Hongkongers' more Westernized outlook. The results of a multiple regression analysis showed that education level (β = -.19), homophobia (β = .30), and conformity to norms (β = .14) were independent predictors of HIV-related stigma but not age, income, or cultural orientations. By differentiating between associated social-cultural factors, this study provides a more nuanced understanding of the layered nature of HIV-related stigma: not broadly grounded in religion or Chinese culture but stemming from more specific social-cultural beliefs - perceptions of norm violation and negative attitudes toward homosexuality, which were not mutually exclusive. These findings have implications for HIV-related stigma reduction by providing evidence for the importance of addressing homophobia. Existing HIV publicity activities should be re-examined for inadvertent contribution to the stigmatization process - particularly press conferences and prevention campaigns that reinforce negative stereotypes of gay/bisexual men and PLWH.

Social media hold enormous potential for sexuality education and sexual health promotion among young people given the audience reach and interactive functions that could be adapted for intervention delivery. This paper reports the preliminary findings of an ongoing research project on the use of social media as a platform for peer sexual communication, by exploring the nature of content posted on Facebook confession pages. We collected 2186 original posts rom one of these semi-anonymous peer exchanges, a Facebook "sex secrets" page popular with college students in Hong Kong. Analysis revealed that conventional sexual activities within the context of romantic heterosexual relationships were most frequently mentioned in the posts. Problematic or risky sexual activities such as hook-ups (spontaneous casual sex) and sexting that are common among American college students were not salient. Nevertheless, the sexual culture of Hong Kong college students was not without peculiarities. Fetish or roleplay, for instance, was mentioned thrice as often as sexting. Findings on intimate concerns illuminate the needs and gaps in sexuality education and sexual health knowledge.

Prior studies have suggested that despite increasing sustainability awareness, many consumers are confused about the impact of green products on their health and the environment. Unlike those studies that privilege professional discourse and adopt unrealistic presumptions of rationality and morality, this article showcases consumers as active co-producers of value and meanings. Using netnography, it analyzes social media conversations around Naked Juice and Innocent smoothies—two products marketed as healthy, all-natural, and environmentally sustainable beverages. The findings reveal a baseline picture of the products' virtues of healthiness feeling (hedonic) and holistic health image (symbolic). The article illustrates how this moral conception was dynamically constructed and transformed in the course of consumers' communicative practices. It proposes three discursive strategies by which consumers negotiate the nature and boundaries of good and bad choices vis-a-vis the products: highlighting (separating...

Mobile dating apps with geolocative function have gained popularity for fostering social, romantic and sexual connections between proximate strangers. Focusing on the experience of social time, this paper sheds light on users' experience on two popular gay mobile dating apps, namely Grindr and Jack'd. Based on in-depth interviews and focus-group discussions with 74 young gay men in Hong Kong, this paper identifies that the tempo and sequence produced by the specific affordances of apps are important to understanding users' experience. Specifically, accelerated tempo of interactions facilitated by constant connectivity, ubiquitous computing, geolocative function, and the apps' messaging system was seen to entail instantaneous and ephemeral relationships. The interface design, which foregrounds profile photos and backgrounds textual self-descriptions, structures the sequence of browsing and screening in a way that prioritizes physical appearance. This design feature was perceived to privilege users seeking casual hook-ups. These findings suggest that the temporality of browsing and exchange on apps is incongruous with the temporal norms prescribing formation of friendship and long-term romance. The violation of these normative expectations affects the perceived quality and satisfaction of app use, resulting in users' frustrations.

This study is among the first to examine the sexual risk behaviors and attendant factors of young men who have sex with men (YMSM) in Hong Kong using location-aware gay social networking mobile applications ("gay apps"). Among the 213 YMSM (Mage = 21.52, SD = 2.29 years, range 17-25) who reported their recent (past six months) sexual history with male partners and gay apps use, inconsistent condom use (ICU) during anal sex was fairly common (60.2% regular partners, 45.8% non-regular partners). One-fifth of the sample reported condomless internal ejaculation (CIE) during anal sex (19.3% insertive, 19.8% receptive). Frequent "Grindr" and "Jack'd" users were less likely to report anal sex, and hence ICU, with regular [adjusted odds ratio (AOR) = 0.72] and non-regular (AOR = 0.62) partners, respectively. Sexual partnering via apps doubled the odds of ICU with both regular (AOR = 1.99) and non-regular (AOR = 2.17) partners. The odds of ICU with regular partners also increased with relationship status (AOR = 2.86 exclusive, AOR = 3.23 non-exclusive) but reduced for those who never had STI/HIV testing (AOR = 0.27). With non-regular partners, YMSM's likelihood of ICU increased with more recent partners (AOR = 3.25) and drug use (AOR = 3.79), but reduced with group sex (AOR = 0.15). The odds of receptive CIE increased with alcohol consumption (AOR = 4.04), non-exclusive relationship (AOR = 4.10), and more recent partners (AOR = 2.47), but reduced with group sex (AOR = 0.15) and older age (AOR = 0.84). For insertive CIE, the odds increased with bisexual YMSM (AOR = 2.89), exclusive relationship (AOR = 3.97), and longtime apps-use (AOR = 1.81). The findings identify meaningful differences among YMSM app-users that inform sexual health intervention and suggest attention on alcohol or drug use during sex and condomless sex with non-exclusive regular partners.

Young men who have sex with men are becoming the most at-risk subgroup for HIV incidence in Hong Kong. To understand how young gay men in Hong Kong interpret and implement safer sex and condom use, focus-group discussions and individual in-depth interviews were held. The 74 participants were nearly all ethnic Chinese gay men aged between 18 and 25 years. Findings indicate that the challenge for health intervention lies in young gay men's inconsistent condom use despite their high level of HIV-related knowledge. Participants described using condoms, testing for HIV and abstaining from anal sex as measures undertaken to prevent HIV infection. However, sociocultural norms and expectations pertaining to '0' (docile, bottom) and '1' (assertive, top) roles and trust between partners complicate the consistent implementation of risk-reduction measures. Influenced by heteronormative and romantic beliefs, sexual behaviours such as condomless anal sex and internal ejaculation hold symbolic meanings - exclusivity, commitment, intimacy, possession - for young gay men in Hong Kong, which override health concerns. These findings support more empowerment-driven HIV programming for young gay men.

This paper explores the dynamics of the Electronic Road Pricing (ERP) innovation in Singapore, tracing its implementation to subsequent diffusion to delineate the links between technology and society. The ERP system, introduced in 1998, is an elaborate and sophisticated toll collecting system using ICTs to regulate road usage. We use the actor–network theory (ANT) as a conceptual tool to analyse the dynamics of this innovation. Through a detailed examination of both human and non‐human actors, we are able to analyse how interests of heterogeneous members of a societal network can be aligned to introduce a technological innovation. In the process, we have observed issues arising from the differential power relationship that exists between road users and government planners as well as the integration of the social and technical aspects of this emerging socio‐technological system. As an emergent technology, the ERP innovation system reflects the social morphology of Singapore as it plays out its part in the ...

Consumers9 active and discretionary use of social media is influenced by a myriad of individual attributes. Which of these attributes really matter and how do they matter? This article proposes an exploratory structural-equation model comprising five constructs (“Big Five” personality dimensions, motives, involvement, content preferences, and usage) derived from the cognitive-affective personality system theory and 3M model of motivation and personality. Applied to a survey of 656 YouTube users, the findings indicated that participation in social media can be understood parsimoniously as oriented toward the self (individualist) or others (relational). The psychological profiles obtained suggest that relational-oriented consumers make a better target group when seeding a campaign than early adopters, as the former are more likely to generate word-of-mouth, and can be targeted by messages emphasizing informational learning.