The Mediated Amplification of a Crisis: Communicating the A/H1N1 Pandemic in Press Releases and Press Coverage in Europe.

In the aftermath of the A/H1N1 pandemic, health authorities were criticized for failures in crisis communication efforts, and the media were accused of amplifying the pandemic. Considering these criticisms, A/H1N1 provides a suitable case for examining risk amplification processes that may occur in the transfer of information from press releases to print news media during a health crisis. We integrated the social amplification of risk framework with theories of news decisions (news values, framing) in an attempt to contribute to existing research both theoretically and empirically.

Infants' and adults' looking behavior does not indicate perceptual distraction for constrained modelled actions - An eye-tracking study.

When observing a novel action, infants pay attention to the model's constraints when deciding whether to imitate this action or not. Gergely et al. (2002) found that more 14-month-olds copied a model's use of her head to operate a lamp when she used her head while her hands were free than when she had to use this means because it was the only means available to her (i.

Barriers of Influenza Vaccination Intention and Behavior - A Systematic Review of Influenza Vaccine Hesitancy, 2005 - 2016.

Background: Influenza vaccine hesitancy is a significant threat to global efforts to reduce the burden of seasonal and pandemic influenza. Potential barriers of influenza vaccination need to be identified to inform interventions to raise awareness, influenza vaccine acceptance and uptake.

Objective: This review aims to (1) identify relevant studies and extract individual barriers of seasonal and pandemic influenza vaccination for risk groups and the general public; and (2) map knowledge gaps in understanding influenza vaccine hesitancy to derive directions for further research and inform interventions in this area.

The influence of a bystander agent's beliefs on children's and adults' decision-making process.

The ability to attribute and represent others' mental states (e.g., beliefs; so-called "theory of mind") is essential for participation in human social interaction.

Exploring and Promoting Prosocial Vaccination: A Cross-Cultural Experiment on Vaccination of Health Care Personnel.

Influenza vaccination for health care personnel (HCP) is recommended particularly because it indirectly protects patients from contracting the disease. Vaccinating can therefore be interpreted as a prosocial act. However, HCP vaccination rates are often far too low to prevent nosocomial infections.

Promoting Physical Activity With Group Pictures. Affiliation-Based Visual Communication for High-Risk Populations.

Past research in social and health psychology has shown that affiliation motivation is associated with health behavior, especially for high-risk populations, suggesting that targeting this motivation could be a promising strategy to promote physical activity. However, the effects that affiliation appeals (e.g.

Children's understanding of first- and third-person perspectives in complement clauses and false-belief tasks.

De Villiers (Lingua, 2007, Vol. 117, pp. 1858-1878) and others have claimed that children come to understand false belief as they acquire linguistic constructions for representing a proposition and the speaker's epistemic attitude toward that proposition.

Skewed risk perceptions in pregnant women: the case of influenza vaccination.

Background: Pregnant women and their newborns have an increased risk of developing severe influenza and influenza-related complications. In Germany, seasonal influenza vaccination is recommended for pregnant women since 2010. However, little is known about pregnant women's vaccination-related knowledge and attitudes, as well as their risk perceptions.

Lost in search: (Mal-)adaptation to probabilistic decision environments in children and adults.

Adaptive decision making in probabilistic environments requires individuals to use probabilities as weights in predecisional information searches and/or when making subsequent choices. Within a child-friendly computerized environment (Mousekids), we tracked 205 children's (105 children 5-6 years of age and 100 children 9-10 years of age) and 103 adults' (age range: 21-22 years) search behaviors and decisions under different probability dispersions (.17; .

Music Perception Influences Language Acquisition: Melodic and Rhythmic-Melodic Perception in Children with Specific Language Impairment.

Language and music share many properties, with a particularly strong overlap for prosody. Prosodic cues are generally regarded as crucial for language acquisition. Previous research has indicated that children with SLI fail to make use of these cues.

Infant and adult pupil dilation in response to unexpected sounds.

Surprisingly occurring sounds outside the focus of attention can involuntarily capture attention. This study focuses on the impact of deviant sounds on the pupil size as a marker of auditory involuntary attention in infants. We presented an oddball paradigm including four types of deviant sounds within a sequence of repeated standard sounds to 14-month-old infants and to adults.

Children's level of word knowledge predicts their exclusion of familiar objects as referents of novel words.

When children are learning a novel object label, they tend to exclude as possible referents familiar objects for which they already have a name. In the current study, we wanted to know if children would behave in this same way regardless of how well they knew the name of potential referent objects, specifically, whether they could only comprehend it or they could both comprehend and produce it. Sixty-six monolingual German-speaking 2-, 3-, and 4-year-old children participated in two experimental sessions.

Detrimental effects of introducing partial compulsory vaccination: experimental evidence.

Background: During outbreaks of vaccine-preventable diseases, compulsory vaccination is sometimes discussed as a last resort to counter vaccine refusal. Besides ethical arguments, however, empirical evidence on the consequences of making selected vaccinations compulsory is lacking. Such evidence is needed to make informed public health decisions.

Improving Medical Decision Making and Health Promotion through Culture-Sensitive Health Communication: An Agenda for Science and Practice.

This review introduces the concept of culture-sensitive health communication. The basic premise is that congruency between the recipient's cultural characteristics and the respective message will increase the communication's effectiveness. Culture-sensitive health communication is therefore defined as the deliberate and evidence-informed adaptation of health communication to the recipients' cultural background in order to increase knowledge and improve preparation for medical decision making and to enhance the persuasiveness of messages in health promotion.

Males matter: Increased home range size is associated with the number of resident males after controlling for ecological factors in wild Assamese macaques.

Objectives: There is increasing evidence of male resource defense during intergroup encounters in non-human primates. Only few studies showed a reproductive benefit of having more males in a group, and evidence only comes from territorial species, or from species with relatively small male group sizes where males are less prone to suffer from collective action problems. We investigated the effect of male group size on home range size and female reproductive success in a non-territorial species with male dispersal and large male group sizes.

Source Credibility and the Biasing Effect of Narrative Information on the Perception of Vaccination Risks.

Immunization rates are below the Global Immunization Vision and Strategy established by the World Health Organization. One reason for this are anti-vaccination activists, who use the Internet to disseminate their agenda, frequently by publishing narrative reports about alleged vaccine adverse events. In health communication, the use of narrative information has been shown to be effectively persuasive.

The impact of attention on judgments of frequency and duration.

Previous studies that examined human judgments of frequency and duration found an asymmetrical relationship: While frequency judgments were quite accurate and independent of stimulus duration, duration judgments were highly dependent upon stimulus frequency. A potential explanation for these findings is that the asymmetry is moderated by the amount of attention directed to the stimuli. In the current experiment, participants' attention was manipulated in two ways: (a) intrinsically, by varying the type and arousal potential of the stimuli (names, low-arousal and high-arousal pictures), and (b) extrinsically, by varying the physical effort participants expended during the stimulus presentation (by lifting a dumbbell vs.

Does verbatim sentence recall underestimate the language competence of near-native speakers?

Verbatim sentence recall is widely used to test the language competence of native and non-native speakers since it involves comprehension and production of connected speech. However, we assume that, to maintain surface information, sentence recall relies particularly on attentional resources, which differentially affects native and non-native speakers. Since even in near-natives language processing is less automatized than in native speakers, processing a sentence in a foreign language plus retaining its surface may result in a cognitive overload.

What you get is what you believe: eighteen-month-olds demonstrate belief understanding in an unexpected-identity task.

Based on recent findings of implicit studies, researchers have claimed that even infants can understand others' false beliefs. However, it is unclear whether infants are able to understand others' belief about an object's identity when this object can be represented in different ways. In a novel interactive unexpected-identity task derived from the appearance-reality paradigm, 18-month-olds helped an adult to achieve her goal based on the adult's belief about an object's identity.

18-month-olds comprehend indirect communicative acts.

From soon after their first birthdays young children are able to make inferences from a communicator's referential act (e.g., pointing to a container) to her overall social goal for communication (e.