This study examines how narrative and humor function within the “Get Real About Diabetes” health communication campaign, which features spokesperson messaging by actor Anthony Anderson. Guided by Miller-Day and Hecht’s Narrative Engagement Framework and Foss’s rhetorical criticism, we conducted a narrative and rhetorical analysis of 19 media artifacts to examine how culturally tailored storytelling strategies engage African American audiences in diabetes awareness and self-management. The analysis reveals recurring persuasive features –including testimonial narrative, cultural symbolism, and humor – as key mechanisms for enhancing audience identification, emotional engagement, and cultural message resonant. Findings indicate that narratives not only contribute to raising diabetes awareness but also reframe diabetes management discourse as an empowering and culturally significant endeavor. This study contributes to the growing body of scholarship on culturally grounded health communication, demonstrating the value of integrating narrative and rhetorical frameworks to design more engaging, resonant public campaigns.

Social media platforms such as TikTok hold tremendous promise for reaching large proportions of the general population with health messaging. However, the proliferation of health misinformation on these platforms poses a significant public health risk. Partnerships between public health experts and social media content creators are a novel intervention, which may overcome concerns about misinformation, and catalyze the proliferation of evidence-based health messages on social media. To build such partnerships between creators and mental health and health communication experts, the Center for Health Communication at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health held an in-person Summit that attracted mental health creators working on TikTok and other social media platforms. Over the course of two days, creators were exposed to techniques for communicating evidence-based information and discussions on how to promote mental health online. Following the Summit, creators (n = 14) provided immediate open-ended qualitative feedback about the Summit. Then, 6-months later, creators were re-contacted for in-depth interviews to explore the impact of the summit on their beliefs and behaviors. In both the immediate post-Summit feedback and 6-month post-Summit interviews, creators reported that attending the Summit impacted their content-making behaviors, increased their sense of responsibility and awareness of their power to impact mental health outcomes among social media users, validated their role as health communicators, and created a much-needed community of support among peers. Given that social media is a primary source of health information for many people, our findings provide a blueprint for public health communicators hoping to build lasting strategic relationships with today’s most influential media gatekeepers.

This study proposes a dual-motive model of health information seeking and avoidance, incorporating two distinctive motives for information behaviors – the accuracy and defense motives. In the proposed model, we identify the key antecedents to these two motives and explore political ideology as a potential moderator. In the context of COVID-19, an online survey was conducted with 638 respondents in South Korea. The results indicate that information insufficiency is linked to information seeking, whereas information overload and denial explain information avoidance to a greater extent. Trust in government and risk perception are negatively linked to information overload, reactance, and denial. Liberals’ and conservatives’ perceptions of risk and emotions differently activate information motives and behaviors. These findings provide theoretical and practical implications for health information management.

Social media creates a hostile environment for HIV health communication, fostering anonymous and fast digital knowledge sharing. However, research on users’ digital health comminution on China’s HIV narrative on global social media platforms, such as YouTube, remains limited. To advance the communication of health information globally, this study analyzes 255 videos and 3,184 comments (2006–2024) to explore the discourse surrounding China’s HIV/AIDS prevention measures on YouTube and provide support for optimizing public health communication strategies. The research employs web scraping techniques to extract metadata and applies methods such as word cloud analysis, keyword analysis, semantic analysis, sentiment analysis, and Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modeling. The results indicate that the main topics of public discussion focus on international cooperation, traditional medicine, and policy transparency. Semantic analysis reveals the impact of cultural factors on public perception. Sentiment analysis shows that positive sentiment is concentrated on prevention effectiveness and international cooperation, while negative sentiment focuses on policy transparency and insufficient information disclosure. The LDA analysis identifies five core themes: international cooperation, cultural factors, policy transparency, the role of traditional medicine, and the effectiveness of public health policies. The findings suggest that public perceptions of China’s prevention measures are complex, highlighting the need to optimize communication strategies and improve policy transparency to enhance international recognition and support.

Based on constructs from source credibility and narrative engagement theory, this research examines (a) the mediators or processes whereby celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) sources enhance narrative persuasion and (b) the moderators or conditions under which celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) sources persuade. The study employed a two-group (celebrity vs. non-celebrity) between-subjects experimental design with 360 participants. Results showed that, compared to the non-celebrity source, the celebrity source was perceived as more attractive, which increased narrative engagement, consequently led to more positive behavioral intentions and policy opinions, particularly among those with low involvement. These results practically suggest that health campaigns that aim at low involvement audiences could benefit from the use of celebrity sources in narrative messages. This research integrates theories of narrative transportation, source credibility, and the elaboration likelihood model (ELM) to examine how celebrity (vs. non-celebrity) sources influence health campaign effectiveness. By testing the sequential mediating effects of source credibility and narrative engagement, the study provides a more comprehensive understanding of narrative persuasion using celebrity sources, particularly in the context of health campaigns for cardiovascular diseases.

This case study examines the United Chinese Americans Wellness, Advocacy, Voices, Education, and Support (UCA WAVES) initiative as a culturally responsive, systems-based model for community mental health. Guided by a hybrid framework integrating Culturally Responsive Theory of Change (CRToC) and Community-Based System Dynamics (CBSD), we analyze how interdependent subsystems (e.g. advocacy, storytelling, culturally adapted psychoeducation, peer support) reinforce one another to reduce stigma, build trust, enhance sustained engagement, and drive policy change despite resource constraints. Theoretically, the case illustrates how systems design and cultural responsiveness can align micro-, meso-, and macro-level changes to increase intervention resilience. Practically, it offers strategies for integrating digital and in-person engagement, leveraging volunteer networks, and fostering multi-sector collaboration.

With recent drops in organ donation support exacerbating the organ shortage, the current investigation sought to explore the potential for organ donor gratitude letters to be utilized in organ donation promotion. To this end, we conducted a content analysis of gratitude letters shared on Korean Organ Donation Agency’s (KODA) website (N = 98), with an emphasis on identifying the emotions recipients experienced throughout their transplant journey, tribute messages to donors, and supportive messages to donor families. Results revealed that when writing about pre-transplantation, hopelessness was mentioned most often, followed by sadness. During transplant, hopelessness was again mentioned most often, however, there was no mention of sadness. In the post-transplant phase, recipients most often mentioned gratitude, followed by happiness and guilt. Such shifts in emotions created an emotional flow within the narrative, from hopelessness and sadness, through sheer hopelessness, to gratitude. Tributes often described donors as heroes and rarely referenced religion, contradicting the belief that religiosity is a barrier to organ donation in East Asia. Currently, organ donation promotional efforts do not make organ recipient letters available to the public. Further implications of donor tribute letters in promoting organ donation are discussed.

The topic of adolescent sexual education has been of longstanding concern to health communication scholars, as have mediated sexual socialization processes and effects. Yet few investigations have explored how sexual media use affects adults’ attitudes toward adolescent sex education, despite the vital role of public opinion in the policy making process and continued evidence of sexual media’s widespread popularity. The present paper presents a replication of a seminal study in this area in the context of a pornography measurement experiment. The replicative component compares results from the original and contemporary data using the same pornography consumption measure. The experimental component compares results in the contemporary data generated by two differing pornography consumption measures. Data are from an ongoing national probability survey of U.S. adults. Results supported the replicability of the original findings suggesting that pornography consumption indirectly affects U.S. adults’ support for sex education in public schools through increased acceptance of adolescents’ sexual behavior, but this mechanistic process is more likely for the less religious and less likely for the more religious. Implications for the sexual script acquisition, activation, application model’s (3AM) morality clause and abstract scripting postulate, pornography consumption measurement, replication science, and socially polarizing research topics are discussed.

Research suggests associations between public understanding and support for evidence-based responses to the ongoing opioid crisis, yet communication inequality theory indicates that social position may systematically influence access to health information. This study examines demographic correlates of both active information seeking and passive information exposure across multiple channels, analyzing a nationally representative sample of 6,543 US adults. The findings advance communication inequality theory by revealing distinct information pathways: lower educational attainment was associated with actively seeking information on television, while higher attainment correlated with web searches. Political affiliations aligned with distinct media ecosystems, and racial identity corresponded with significantly different rates of passive exposure from sources like healthcare professionals and television. These patterns, along with higher information seeking from personal and medical networks among those with a family or personal history of opioid use, suggest that social groups inhabit fundamentally different information realities, potentially contributing to divergent understandings of the crisis. These findings highlight the need to design communication strategies that account for how social position shapes information pathways. Future research should examine whether exposure through these channels relates to public understanding and policy support.