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Appeals to personal responsibility are highly prevalent in health communication campaigns, but their use entails both moral and strategic considerations. This article provides an overview of the notion of personal responsibility as a persuasive appeal in public health communication campaigns and an analysis of concomitant ethical implications. Whereas the issue of responsibility often is acknowledged by practitioners and scholars as a perennial challenge in health interventions, conceptual tools for the identification of its subtle manifestations are not readily available. This article outlines a framework that contextualizes potentially paradoxical consequences of campaign appeals to personal responsibility that can be explained by the medieval allegory of the "Tragedy of the Commons," psychological attribution theory, and public health concerns regarding "blaming the victim." Practice-oriented questions are introduced to help identify ethical issues in personal responsibility appeals that can be utilized in the design and implementation of health campaigns.

Phonemic restoration is a powerful auditory illusion that arises when a phoneme is removed from a word and replaced with noise, resulting in a percept that sounds like the intact word with a spurious bit of noise. It is hypothesized that the configurational properties of the word impair attention to the individual phonemes and thereby induce perceptual restoration of the missing phoneme. If so, this impairment might be unlearned if listeners can process individual phonemes within a word selectively. Subjects received training with the potentially restorable stimuli (972 trials with feedback); in addition, the presence or absence of an attentional cue, contained in a visual prime preceding each trial, was varied between groups of subjects. Cuing the identity and location of the critical phoneme of each test word allowed subjects to attend to the critical phoneme, thereby inhibiting the illusion, but only when the prime also identified the test word itself. When the prime provided only the identity or location of the critical phoneme, or only the identity of the word, subjects performed identically to those subjects for whom the prime contained no information at all about the test word. Furthermore, training did not produce any generalized learning about the types of stimuli used. A limited interactive model of auditory word perception is discussed in which attention operates through the lexical level.

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