The Patient Activation Measure is a valid, highly reliable, unidimensional, probabilistic Guttman‐like scale that reflects a developmental model of activation. Activation appears to involve four stages: (1) believing the patient role is important, (2) having the confidence and knowledge necessary to take action, (3) actually taking action to maintain and improve one's health, and (4) staying the course even under stress. The measure has good psychometric properties indicating that it can be used at the individual patient level to tailor intervention and assess changes. (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1475-6773.2004.00269.x)

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How to create Twitter Posters

Almost everything you need to know about writing, reading, submitting, and understanding satire and humor.

all or nothing messaging may be harmful

Our new campaign – called Spring of Hope – shares one powerful and uplifting illustration per day, every day, until the end of May –– https://fineacts.co/hope. All works, commissioned specifically for the campaign, are published under a Creative Commons License and are free to print, share and adapt non-commercially – for anyone who needs a dose of hope in these trying times.

In Wales road signs are written in both English and Welsh. However the Welsh text actually reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated”

handwashing sign

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designing for emotional states

applying behavioral science to health promotion

We tested how reframing the name of the vegetarian food category shapes food choices. • Environmental, social, and neutral (vs. vegetarian) frames boosted vegetarian choice. • No consistent differences emerged among the three non-vegetarian frames. • We investigated the underlying psychological mechanisms behind the main effects.

This meta-analysis began with a review of relevant literature on the perseverance of attitudes and beliefs and then assessed the impact of moderators on the misinformation, debunking, and misinformation-persistence effects. Compared with results from single experiments, meta-analysis is a useful catalogue of experimental paradigms, dependent variables, moderators, and other methods factors used in studies in related domains. In light of our findings, we offer three recommendations: (a) reduce arguments that support misinformation, (b) engage audiences in scrutiny and counterarguing of misinformation, and (c) introduce new information as part of the debunking message.

To fully explain how viral content – and viruses – spread, we need to move away from the idea that outbreaks involve simple clockwork infections, passing along a chain from person to person to person until large numbers have been exposed. During the 2015 outbreak of the Mers coronavirus in South Korea, 82 out of 186 infections came from a single “superspreading event” in a hospital where an infected person was being treated. It’s not yet clear how common such superspreading is in the current outbreak, but we do know that these kinds of events are how information goes viral online; most outbreaks on Twitter are dominated by a handful of individuals or media outlets, which are responsible for a large proportion of transmission. If you heard about snake flu, you might have told a couple of friends; meanwhile, newspaper headlines were telling millions. When tackling disease outbreaks, health agencies often work to identify potential superspreading events, isolating infected individuals to prevent further transmission. However, this isn’t the only way to stop an outbreak. As well as tracking down people who are infectious, it’s possible to target broader social interactions that might amplify transmission. For example, many cities in China have recently closed schools, which can be hotspots for respiratory infections.

I’ve been working on a model to help explain the stages of peer health connection and I’d love to get feedback on it.

Immense amounts of information are now accessible to people, including information that bears on their past, present and future. An important research challenge is to determine how people decide to seek or avoid information. Here we propose a framework of information-seeking that aims to integrate the diverse motives that drive information-seeking and its avoidance. Our framework rests on the idea that information can alter people’s action, affect and cognition in both positive and negative ways. The suggestion is that people assess these influences and integrate them into a calculation of the value of information that leads to information-seeking or avoidance. The theory offers a framework for characterizing and quantifying individual differences in information-seeking, which we hypothesize may also be diagnostic of mental health. We consider biases that can lead to both insufficient and excessive information-seeking. We also discuss how the framework can help government agencies to assess the welfare effects of mandatory information disclosure.

5 key principles

And as to the central question of using both fear and hope: “I think we're in a moment where fear is a stronger motivator than hope,“ Parfrey began. “I'm looking at the evidence. I'm looking at Greta Thunberg. There is a tinge of the apocalypse in her framing.“ But Parfrey was quick to add that fear, by itself, isn't the only button to press. “The data is clear on this,“ he said. “The more dire the messages sound, the more individuals will tuneout. And I say this with full-knowledge that the climate picture is dire. You have to be honest, you have to present the sobering information, yet we still have the choice before us to dramatically improve the situation or make it worse. The choice is still ours.“

LESSON 1: SHIFT THE FRAME FROM PORTRAIT TO LANDSCAPE. (this is part of a 3-post blog series on message framing)