public health messaging

Study: Trust in science spiked after media coverage of Zika vaccine trial

kkrisberg — Thu, 03 Aug 2017 20:26:49 +0000

Study: Trust in science spiked after media coverage of Zika vaccine trial

Public trust in science is a fickle creature. Surveys show a clear majority of Americans believe science has positively impacted society, and they’re more likely to trust scientists on issues like climate change and vaccines. On the other hand, surveys also find that factors like politics, religion, age and race can greatly impact the degree of that trust. It presents a delicate challenge for agencies that depend on trust in science to do their jobs.

“Trust in science is high, but it’s not unanimous and it’s not completely unquestioned — and nor necessarily should it be,” Joseph Hilgard, an assistant professor of social psychology at Illinois State University, told me. “We assume that people don’t trust us because they don’t know what (scientists) know, but that’s not really the case. You have ideology, perspective, values — all these different lenses coming into play and that’s a great challenge for science communication.”

Hilgard is the co-author of a new study that provides some interesting insights into possible ways to improve public trust in science. The study, published in the August issue of Science Communication, is based on data collected via the Annenberg Science Knowledge survey, which began in 2016 and conducts nationwide bilingual telephone surveys on a weekly basis. Last August, the survey enhanced its ongoing data collection on Zika knowledge and attitudes, adding in another 500 people from the high-risk state of Florida. In examining the Zika data, researchers detected a noteworthy trend: following media coverage of a potential Zika vaccine, respondents reported greater trust in science for providing solutions to problems.

Hilgard, who at the time was a postdoctoral fellow at the Annenberg Public Policy Center, cautioned right off the bat that the findings are correlational and it’s difficult to draw any generalized implications, especially since Zika doesn’t have the polarizing effect of some other scientific issues. And unlike other Zika solutions — like aerial spraying and genetically modified mosquitoes — a vaccine is relatively uncontroversial. Still, the findings could suggest that particular circumstances are conducive to facilitating trust in science.

Hilgard and co-author Kathleen Hall Jamieson write:

A Zika vaccine has clear benefits, improving human health by preventing birth disorders, and vaccination does not conflict with mainstream public values or cultural norms. Additionally, media coverage of the Zika virus has established Zika prevention as a matter of public concern and general importance. These attributes make this news cycle a useful opportunity to observe the relationship between news of scientific progress and public attitudes toward science.

In examining answers from more than 34,000 survey responses, researchers found that in the weeks following news that a Zika vaccine had entered its first human trial, people paid more attention to Zika news and public trust in science went up. In particular, that trust bump followed increases in Google searches for “Zika vaccine” as well as news reports featuring Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, and Tom Frieden, then-director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The heightened trust lasted only two weeks, but greater attention to Zika overall lasted for six weeks.

However, the increased trust in science didn’t extend to the federal agencies tasked with Zika response and research. Within the same period of Zika vaccine news, opinions of both the National Institutes of Health and CDC remained the same. The vaccine news also had no effect on whether people felt the federal government was prepared to deal with a Zika outbreak in their community — those opinions stayed stable throughout the study period as well. Hilgard and Jamieson write:

This finding opens the possibility that confidence in science could be bolstered in a more sustained fashion by regularized communication about advances made by science. These communications may be particularly effective when they provide potential solutions to problems placed by media on the national agenda. However, such effects are likely to be relatively brief even under the best of circumstances. Additionally, such communications may backfire if the public feels that a problem or its solution is overstated for the personal benefit of scientists, politicians, or the media, although further empirical research is needed.

“This may seem like a surprise given the struggle that we sometimes have in expressing the safety of this or that treatment,” Hilgard said of the findings. “But I think it speaks to the idea that it’s not that people dislike science; it’s that they dislike certain science.”

So, what exactly fueled the heightened trust following media reports of the Zika vaccine? The study doesn’t tease those specifics out, but Hilgard had some guesses. First, while vaccine safety can be a sensitive topic, Hilgard said the actual gap in vaccine safety attitudes between scientists and the public probably isn’t as wide as we sometimes fear. Secondly, he said Zika isn’t “morally aligned.” In other words, it doesn’t lend itself to the type of morality discussions that erupted with the advent of the HPV vaccine, which prevents a sexually transmitted disease.

“Zika has very serious health implications and people are afraid of it,” he told me. “You put together fear of Zika, the acceptability of the product and the fact that there’s no real moral element to protecting yourself against Zika, and it leads to a scientific advance that, by and large, people feel good about.”

Because of such factors, Hilgard said it’s difficult to draw any generalized tips for communicating better on other scientific topics. But he did say the study suggests that keeping the public informed on new and promising scientific advances — while staying accurate and not exaggerating — could help nourish public trust.

“Science has always enjoyed a respected place in society, but it’s not unconditional love,” he said. “People want to see science earning its keep — they want know, ‘what have you done for me lately?’”

For a copy of the new study, visit Science Communication.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for 15 years. Follow me on Twitter — @kkrisberg.

kkrisberg Thu, 08/03/2017 - 16:26

Study: Self-affirmation targets the brain in way that makes us receptive to health messaging

kkrisberg — Fri, 06 Feb 2015 16:45:40 +0000

Study: Self-affirmation targets the brain in way that makes us receptive to health messaging

It’s a persistent conundrum in the field of public health — how can we open people’s minds to positively receiving and acting on health information? Previous research has found that combining health tips with messages of self-affirmation may be a particularly effective strategy, but researchers weren’t entirely sure how self-affirmation worked at the neurological level. Now, a new study has found that self-affirmation’s effects on a particular region of the brain may be a major key to behavior change.

In even simpler terms, researchers involved this new study — which examined how self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messaging — found that precisely activating a certain region of the brain could be a central pathway toward positive behavior changes. The findings could point to a relatively low-cost way to yield behavioral changes that could impact some of the nation’s costliest conditions and risk factors, from obesity to tobacco use. Plus, the findings illustrate one way to deliver health messages in a fashion that allows those most at risk to see value in what might otherwise be viewed as judgmental and threatening.

“It seems like we can change neural activity using this simple intervention and it does relate to behavior change down the road,” said study lead author Emily Falk, an assistance professor of communication at the University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School for Communication. “Self-affirmation is a cheap, scalable intervention...and it turns out to have huge effects for a relatively low investment.”

To conduct the study, which was published in February in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Falk and her fellow researchers used functional magnetic resonance imaging to study a region of the brain involved in processing self-relevance known as the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC). To begin, sedentary study participants were first given a list of values — such as family and friends, religion or politics — and asked to rank them in order of meaningfulness. The study sample was then broken into two groups — both groups received the same behavioral health information, but only one group was first primed with a self-affirmation message based on their values ranking. The control group received similar self-affirmation messages, but they were based on values unimportant to them.

Study participants were also fitted with a device that measured their activity levels for a week prior to the study and for a month after the initial intervention. In addition, participants continued to receive text message reminders for a month following the initial intervention. The text reminders would include one self-affirmation message and one health tip. For example, Falk told me a self-affirmation text might prompt the person to think about a time in the future when friends and family might need advice; while the health tip would explain that inactivity puts a person’s health at risk or that the best parking spots are those furthest away from the store. Falk and study co-authors Matthew Brook O’Donnell, Christopher Cascio, Francis Tinney, Yoona Kang, Matthew Lieberman, Shelley Taylor, Lawrence An, Kenneth Resnicow and Victor Strecher write:

VMPFC has been consistently associated with behavior change in response to health messages in prior work. This prior research has suggested that the link between VMPFC activity during health message exposure and behavior change may stem from a recipient’s ability to process a health message as self-relevant or as having value to oneself. Thus, we hypothesized that if affirmation allows people to see otherwise-threatening information as more self-relevant and valuable, delivering self-affirmation before health messages should increase neural activity in VMPFC during message exposure.

And that’s exactly what researchers found. According to the study, people who received relevant self-affirmation messages before getting the health advice showed higher levels of activity in the VMPFC region of the brain at the time of receiving the health messages. However, study participants who were prompted to think about values not ranked as important to them, showed lower levels of activity in that particular part of the brain. And not only did the relevant self-affirmation messages light up the region of the brain associated with positive valuation, it also resulted in actual behavior change. Those who received relevant self-affirmation showed a steeper decline in sedentary behavior in the month following the initial intervention, while those who didn’t receive relevant self-affirmation maintained their baseline levels of sedentary behavior.

Falk told me that previous research has found that brain activity in the VMPFC region tends to be a complimentary predictor of behavior change — in other words, brain activity seems to provide additional information that goes above and beyond what researchers gain from simply asking people questions. However, researchers were somewhat stumped as to why that was the case. At the same time, self-affirmation was emerging as an effective health messaging strategy, but researchers didn’t really know how self-affirmation worked at the neurological level. Falk said this study helps bring all those pieces together.

“We wanted to find a way to precisely engage that region of the brain and self-affirmation is a good tool to do that,” she told me. “The next step in the research is figuring out how to do this at scale, and I do think that’s a possibility.”

To request a full copy of the study, visit the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

kkrisberg Fri, 02/06/2015 - 11:45

Study: Public views of drug addiction much more negative than views of mental illness

kkrisberg — Tue, 14 Oct 2014 15:37:25 +0000

Study: Public views of drug addiction much more negative than views of mental illness

When it comes to substance abuse disorders, public health and the public at-large are hardly on the same page — in fact, they’re not even reading the same book. And that’s a serious problem for sustaining and strengthening efforts to treat addiction and advancing effective public health policy.

“We already know quite a bit about public attitudes toward mental illness and we were interested in learning more — especially in the context of prescription (painkiller) drug abuse — about what the public thinks about issues related to drug addiction,” Colleen Barry, who recently co-authored a study on how the public views drug addiction versus mental illness, told me. “The attitudes of the public can be linked in important ways to broader support for policy action.”

In the study, which was recently published in the journal Psychiatric Services, Barry and colleagues surveyed a representative sample of more than 700 U.S. adults, asking a variety of questions about stigma, social distancing and the acceptability of discrimination. For example, researchers asked questions such as: Would you be willing to have a person with mental illness/drug addiction marry into your family? Would you be willing to have a person with mental illness/drug addiction start working closely with you on a job? Do you favor or oppose requiring insurance companies to offer benefits for the treatment of drug addiction/mental illness that are equivalent to benefits for other medical services? And do you agree that landlords should be able to deny housing to a person with drug addiction/mental illness? Overall, the study found that respondents held significantly more negative views of drug addiction than of mental illness.

Specifically, researchers found that 62 percent of respondents said they’d be willing to work with someone living with a mental illness, but only 22 percent would be willing to work with someone living with addiction. Twenty-five percent said employers should be able to deny employment to people with mental illness; 64 percent said the practice should be allowed regarding drug addiction. Twenty-one percent of respondents opposed offering insurance parity for mental illness, while 43 percent opposed such parity for patients with drug addiction. Fifty-four percent thought landlords should be allowed to refuse housing to people with drug addiction, while 15 percent had a similar view about people with mental illness. Overall, researchers found higher opposition to public policies aimed at helping people struggling with drug addiction when compared to policies in support of people with mental illness. However, respondents did seem to agree in one area: About one in three believe that recovery from either drug addiction or mental illness is impossible.

Study co-authors Barry, Emma McGinty, Bernice Pescosolido and Howard Goldman write:

Less sympathetic views may result at least in part from societal ambivalence about whether to regard substance abuse problems as medical conditions to be treated (similar to other chronic health conditions, such as diabetes or heart disease) or personal failings to be overcome. More so than mental illness, addiction is often viewed as a moral shortcoming, and the illegality of drug use reinforces this perspective. It is likely that socially unacceptable behavior accompanying drug addiction (for example, impaired driving and crime) heightens society’s condemnation.

“It was surprising to me how negative the attitudes were,” said Barry, an associate professor in the Departments of Healthy Policy Management and Mental Health at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “From a policy perspective, we tend to roll mental illness and addiction together…but the way the public thinks about them is very different — more different than I would have expected.”

In efforts to reduce societal stigmas around drug addiction, Barry called for better public information about the treatability of drug addiction and media coverage that more accurately portrays the face of addiction. For example, many people might automatically associate drug addiction with the image of a strung-out drug user living on the streets. But that image misconstrues the growing reality of drug addiction and the idea that drug addiction can happen to anyone and in all walks of life, Barry told me. In fact, such a stereotypical image of addiction could significantly impact public support for policy action at a time when public health practitioners are struggling to contain increases in prescription painkiller and heroin-related deaths and overdose. In addition, such societal attitudes often prevent those who need treatment for addiction from seeking help. Barry noted that currently, less than 10 percent of people with an addiction disorder seek any treatment at all.

“We have a whole new population that needs treatment that is not going to get into treatment in the context of broader social attitudes,” she said, referring to the prescription painkiller abuse epidemic. “So this is a huge issue. …Public support plays a major role in determining which public policies get advanced and which don’t. When we look at the state of the substance abuse treatment system, it’s terribly underfunded and part of that has to do with an underlying lack of support among the public.”

To address the problem, the study calls for “portraying addiction or mental illness as treatable.” In this realm, Barry noted that with advancements in mental health treatments, such as the availability of selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors (SSRIs) to treat depression and anxiety, people became more comfortable talking publicly about their struggles with mental illness and thus, stigmas around mental health begin to break down. Unfortunately, on the addiction side, we’re behind in both treatment and public acceptance, she noted.

However, the arrow between public opinion and policy change is bidirectional, Barry tells me. In other words, policy can help shift public attitudes as well. She’s talking about the Affordable Care Act, which now requires insurance companies participating in the new health insurance marketplace to cover mental health and substance abuse services as essential benefits. Such a high-profile policy change could go a long way in mainstreaming mental health and addiction treatment, Barry said. Still, public attitudes on drug addiction seem far from the public health perspective that considers addiction a chronic disease.

“We need to transform the stories of addiction in our country,” she said. “We need to be more involved in communicating a more true face of what addiction looks like in the U.S. and how treatment can benefit individuals, and that includes influencing how the news media covers these issues as well as how politicians talk about this issue. We need to change the narrative to one of a chronic disease that can benefit from ongoing, effective treatment.”

To read more about the study, visit the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

Kim Krisberg is a freelance public health writer living in Austin, Texas, and has been writing about public health for more than a decade.

kkrisberg Tue, 10/14/2014 - 11:37

No matter what stigma remains about drug addiction, it is important to continue to get the message out that recovery is possible. For those struggling with heroin addiction, there is very real hope in treatment that includes buprenorphine medication combined with health care, counseling and education on the disease of addiction.

Totally agree with this. I have a niece in treatment with www.northpointwashington.com for her various drug addictions. Some members of our family still believe it is all her fault and she is just weak. I might print this out and make them swallow it. I won't obviously do that but it makes me angry about their attitudes - maybe that's why she has ended up where she has.... Anyway, thank you again - great article.