This article summarizes research published over the past decade and identifies areas where future research is needed to increase our knowledge of the media's role in fostering or reducing mental illness stigma. The following questions are addressed: (1) How is mental illness portrayed by the media? (2) How do media images of mental illness impact individuals' knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors with regard to mental illness? (3) How can the media be used to reduce mental illness stigma? The review reveals a lack of recent research on the U.S. media and a need for precision in how mental illness and the media are defined for study. Research is needed that involves a broader range of media channels as well as more distinctions among different types of content within channels and a more detailed analysis of media images themselves. The largest gap to be addressed is the link between exposure to media images and mental illness stigma. Use of the media as a tool for change requires a better understanding of what messages are conveyed, how they are developed, and what role media content producers play in creating these messages.
Differences in emotional response, cognitive response, attitude toward the ad and attitude toward the brand were observed after subjects were exposed to advertising messages of different modalities (audiovisual vs. audio‐only) and appeals (rational vs. emotional). Hypothesized causal models depicting the relationships among the dependent measures were tested using LISREL. Results sup ported the mediating roles of both emotional and cognitive responses in the acceptance of advertising messages.
The Internet offers a unique means of health promotion through the use of interactive tools like chat rooms, E-mail, hyperlinks and the like. This paper reports a study examining links between learning and interactivity of health-related websites. We address three research questions. First, are tools of interactivity present in health-related websites? Second, how prevalent is the occurrence of these interactive tools for three relevant top level domains (TLD) (e.g. .com, .gov and .org)? Finally, are there differences in how representative websites of diverse TLDs employ these interactive tools along nine dimensions of interactivity? A content analysis of 30 websites revealed that while the majority of sites in our sample do use interactive tools, overall the occurrence is quite low. An examination of the use of tools of interactivity across three different TLDs revealed that .com sites used a greater number of tools, followed by .gov sites and, lastly, .org sites. We also found support for our third research question, that different TLDs employ these tools of interactivity differently. How these differences may impact learning are discussed.
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