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IMPORTANCE Depression and anxiety are common and disabling. Primary care is the de facto site for treating these mental health problems but is typically underresourced to meet the burden of these demands.OBJECTIVE To evaluate the efficacy of a mobile intervention platform, IntelliCare, for addressing depression and anxiety among primary care patients.DESIGN, SETTING, AND PARTICIPANTS Two-arm randomized clinical trial at internal medicine clinics at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. Adult primary care patients (N = 146) who screened positive for depression on the Patient Health Questionnaire-8 (PHQ; score Ն 10) or anxiety on the Generalized Anxiety Disorder-7 (GAD-7; score Ն 8) were recruited between July 17, 2018, and December 14, 2018. INTERVENTIONSThe coach-supported platform composed of a suite of apps, was delivered over 8 weeks. Wait list control participants received treatment as usual for 8 weeks, then the mobile platform.MAIN OUTCOMES AND MEASURES Primary outcomes were changes in depression (PHQ-9) and anxiety (GAD-7) during the intervention period. Secondary outcomes were differences in the proportion of patients who achieved recovery (PHQ-9/GAD-7 <5 or 50% improvement from baseline), sustainment of intervention effects during 2-month follow-up, and app use during the intervention period.RESULTS One hundred forty-six patients were included (119 of 146 were women [81.5%]; mean [SD] age, 42.3 [13.8] years). Of the 146 patients, 122 (83.6%) were diagnosed as having depression and 131 (89.7%) were diagnosed as having anxiety. A greater proportion of intervention vs wait list control participants achieved recovery from depression (n = 38 of 64 [59%] vs n = 18 of 58 [31%]; odds ratio, 3.25; 95% CI, 1.54-6.86) and anxiety (n = 37 of 65 [57%] vs n = 25 of 66 [38%]; odds ratio, 2.17; 95% CI, 1.08-4.36). Sustained effects were observed for depression (slope, 0.01; 95% CI, -0.09 to 0.10; P = .92) and anxiety scores (slope, 0.02; 95% CI, -0.08 to 0.12; P = .67) during follow-up. App use was high, with a median of 93 and 98 sessions among participants with depression and anxiety, respectively. CONCLUSIONS AND RELEVANCEIn this trial, a mobile intervention app was effective for depression and anxiety among primary care patients. Findings also support designing digital mental health interventions as platforms containing simple, brief apps that can be bundled by users to meet their needs.TRIAL REGISTRATION ClinicalTrials.gov Identifier: NCT03500536.

Today's fragmented and digital media environment may create a fertile breeding ground for the uncontrolled spread of disinformation. Although previous research has investigated the effects of misinformation and corrective efforts, we know too little about the role of visuals in disinformation and fact checking. Against this backdrop, we conducted an online experiment with a diverse sample of U.S. citizens (N = 1,404) to investigate the credibility of textual versus multimodal (text-plus-visual) disinformation, and the effects of textual and multimodal fact checkers in refuting disinformation on school shootings and refugees. Our findings indicate that, irrespective of the source, multimodal disinformation is considered slightly more credible than textual disinformation. Fact checkers can help to overcome the potential harmful consequences of disinformation. We also found that fact checkers can overcome partisan and attitudinal filterswhich points to the relevance of fact checking as a journalistic discipline.

Automated journalism, the autonomous production of journalistic content through computer algorithms, is increasingly prominent in newsrooms. This enables the production of numerous articles, both rapidly and cheaply. Yet, how news readers perceive journalistic automation is pivotal to the industry, as, like any product, it is dependent on audience approval. As audiences cannot verify all events themselves, they need to trust journalists' accounts, which make credibility a vital quality ascription to journalism. In turn, credibility judgments might influence audiences' selection of automated content for their media diet. Research in this area is scarce, with existing studies focusing on national samples and with no previous research on 'combined' journalism-a relatively novel development where automated content is supplemented by human journalists. We use an experiment to investigate how European news readers (N = 300) perceive different forms of automated journalism in regard to message and source credibility, and how this affects their selection behavior. Findings show that, in large part, credibility perceptions of human, automated, and combined content and source(s) may be assumed equal. Only for sports articles was automated content perceived significantly more credible than human messages. Furthermore, credibility does not mediate the likelihood of news readers to either select or avoid articles for news consumption. Findings are, among other things, explained by topic-specific factors

Repeated viewing of a stimulus causes a change in perceptual sensitivity, known as a visual aftereffect. Similarly, in neuroimaging, repetitions of the same stimulus result in a reduction in the neural response, known as repetition suppression (RS). Previous research shows that aftereffects for faces are reduced in both children with autism and in first-degree relatives. With functional magnetic resonance imaging, we found that the magnitude of RS to faces in neurotypical participants was negatively correlated with individual differences in autistic traits. We replicated this finding in a second experiment, while additional experiments showed that autistic traits also negatively predicted RS to images of scenes and simple geometric shapes. These findings suggest that a core aspect of neural function—the brain's response to repetition—is modulated by autistic traits.