Popular Media Sources Research Articles

Pleasing the Masses: Messages for Daily Life Management in African American Women's Popular Media Sources

Using African American women's insights on their own health experiences, we explored how their daily life management was linked to the "strong Black woman" (SBW) script, and the health implications of that script. Using the search term "strong Black woman," we identified 20 articles from African American women's magazines and 10 blog sites linked to the SBW script and analyzed their content. We created thematic categories (role management, coping, and self-care) and extracted issues relevant to African American women's health. Adherence to the SBW script was linked to women's daily life management and health experiences. Themes such as self-sacrificial role management ("please the masses"), emotional suppression ("game face"), and postponement of self-care ("last on the list") incited internal distress and evinced negative health consequences. Scientists, activists, and health care professionals would be aided in forming initiatives aimed at reducing health disparities among African American women by heeding the insights on their health experiences that they express in popular media sources.

The automated understanding of simple bar charts

While identifying the intention of an utterance has played a major role in natural language understanding, this work is the first to extend intention recognition to the domain of information graphics. A tenet of this work is the belief that information graphics are a form of language. This is supported by the observation that the overwhelming majority of information graphics from popular media sources appear to have some underlying goal or intended message. As Clark noted, language is more than just words. It is any “signal” (or lack of signal when one is expected), where a signal is a deliberate action that is intended to convey a message (Clark, 1996 [15]). As a form of language, information graphics contain communicative signals that can be used in a computational system to identify the message that the graphic conveys. We identify the communicative signals that appear in simple bar charts, and present an implemented Bayesian network methodology for reasoning about these signals and hypothesizing a bar chart's intended message. Once the message conveyed by an information graphic has been inferred, it can then be used to facilitate access to this information resource for a variety of users, including 1) users of digital libraries, 2) visually impaired users, and 3) users of devices where graphics are impractical or inaccessible.

Primary care providers' sources and preferences for cognitive health information in the United States

In most countries, physicians and other health-care providers play key roles in promoting health. Accumulating scientific evidence suggests that providers may soon want to include cognitive health among the areas they promote. Cognitive health is the maintenance of cognitive abilities that enable social connectedness, foster a sense of purpose, promote independent living, allow recovery from illness or injury and promote effective coping with functional deficits. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has established health promotion about cognitive health as a policy priority, with health providers included as one key group to participate in this effort. This study presents results from focus groups and interviews with primary care physicians (n = 28) and midlevel health-care providers (physician assistants and nurse practitioners, n = 21) in three states of the US. Providers were asked about their sources of information on cognitive health and for their ideas on how best to communicate with primary care providers about research on cognitive health. In results, providers cited online sources, popular media and continuing medical education as their most common sources of information about cognitive health. Popular media sources were used both proactively and reactively to respond to patient inquiries. Differences in sources of information were noted for physicians as compared with midlevel providers, and for rural and urban providers. Several potential ways to disseminate information about cognitive health were identified. Effective messaging is likely to require multiple strategies to reach diverse groups of primary care providers, and to include continuing medical education.

Do U.S. food processors respond to sweetener-related health information?

This study examines the differential effects of relative prices and sweetener-related health information on the substitutability between sweeteners in the U.S. food processing sector. Results suggest that cane and corn sugar are gross complements, Allen complements, but Morishima substitutes. Furthermore, the Morishima elasticity of substitution (MES) is more responsive to changes in relative prices than to changes in health information. In addition, the MES for cane- and corn-based sweeteners is more responsive to health information from popular media sources than scientific and medical publications. [EconLit citations: D240, I180, Q110]. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

The Role of seeing blood in non‐suicidal self‐injury

Non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI) is a growing clinical problem, especially among adolescents and young adults. Anecdotal accounts, clinical reports, and popular media sources suggest that observing the blood resulting from NSSI often plays an important role in the behavior's reinforcement. However, research to date has not systematically assessed the role of blood in NSSI. The current study examined this phenomenon in 64 young adults from a college population with histories of non-suicidal skin-cutting. Approximately half the participants reported it was important to see blood during NSSI. These individuals reported spending five minutes or less looking at the blood after each instance of NSSI, and that seeing blood served several functions including "to relieve tension" and "makes me feel calm." In addition, wanting to see blood was associated with greater lifetime frequency of skin-cutting and greater endorsement of intrapersonal functions for NSSI (e.g., affect regulation, self-punishment). Finally, participants who reported wanting to see blood were more likely to endorse symptoms of bulimia nervosa and borderline personality disorder. Theoretical and clinical implications are discussed.