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In this study, we surveyed low-income elderly people in Hong Kong and their family or friends to test a dual-path model with which we identified how misinformation in the media reached elderly people and how the elderly people's perception and acceptance of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) vaccines were influenced. The findings suggest that elderly people's own exposure to erroneous information regarding vaccines and COVID-19 in the media was positively associated with their misperceptions. In addition, their family or friends, who also received misinformation from the media, were found to relay the misleading or erroneous information to the elderly people, indicating a two-step flow of media influence. While previous studies have predominantly focused on the direct influence of misinformation in the media, our study suggests that social influence can also mediate the influence of misinformation in the media and negatively impacts elderly people's perceptions of COVID-19 vaccines.

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Postpartum mental health problems are common and have deleterious effects on new mothers and their babies. This study developed a theoretically informed model of the relationship between exposure to images of motherhood in online parenting content and mothers' postpartum mental health. The model was tested using survey data collected from 509 Chinese mothers during their 12-month postpartum period. The results revealed that greater exposure to online public parenting content was indirectly related to lower levels of shame among new mothers via two mediators: the presumed influence of parenting media content on their partners, and the mothers' perceptions of the discrepancy between their actual selves as mothers and their partners' expectations of an ideal mother (i.e. actual/own - ideal/partner self-discrepancy). In contrast, increased exposure to online private parenting content shared by peers was indirectly related to increased levels of shame among new mothers via the mediation of social comparison with parenting media images, and of the mothers' perceptions of the discrepancy between their actual selves as mothers and their own expectations of an ideal mother (i.e. actual/own - ideal/own self-discrepancy). Additionally, new mothers were more likely to experience depressive symptoms and shame if they felt that they fell short of their partners' expectations of an ideal mother. However, increased social support reduced the anxiety and shame that stemmed from this belief.

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This study examines the effectiveness of the inoculation strategy in countering vaccine-related misinformation among Hong Kong college students. A three-phase between-subject experiment (n = 123) was conducted to compare the persuasive effects of inoculation messages (two-sided messages forewarning about misinformation related to COVID-19 vaccines), supportive messages (conventional health advocacy), and no message control. The results show that inoculation messages were superior to supportive messages at generating resistance to misinformation, as evidenced by more positive vaccine attitudes and stronger vaccine intention. Notably, while we expected the inoculation condition would produce more resistance than the control condition, there was little evidence in favor of this prediction. Attitudinal threat and counterarguing moderated the experimental effects; issue involvement and political trust were found to directly predict vaccine attitudes and intention. The findings suggest that future interventions focus on developing preventive mechanisms to counter misinformation and spreading inoculation over the issue is an effective strategy to generate resistance to misinformation. Interventions should be cautious about using health advocacy initiated by governments among populations with low political trust.

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This study proposes a theory-driven model to concurrently examine the cognitive and emotional factors that motivate vaccine supporters to combat erroneous online anti-vaccination information. The model was tested using data from a web survey of 599 vaccination supporters in the United States. The vaccine supporters reported greater support for government regulation of misinformation when they perceived greater susceptibility among the general public to the influence of misinformation. Surprisingly, the perceived severity of the influence was inversely related to respondents' intention to correct misinformation. In addition, perceived susceptibility to the influence of anti-vaccine misinformation and perceived severity of its influence on others induced negative emotions that included anticipated guilt and anger. The negative emotions in turn motivate vaccine supporters to attitudinally support government's media restriction or behaviorally correct the online misinformation.

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This study examines portrayals of cosmetic surgery on YouTube, where we found a substantial number of cosmetic surgery videos. Most of the videos came from cosmetic surgeons who appeared to be aggressively using social media in their practices. Except for videos that explained cosmetic surgery procedures, most videos in our sample emphasized the benefits of cosmetic surgery, and only a small number of the videos addressed the involved risks. We also found that tactics of persuasive communication-namely, related to message source and message sensation value (MSV)-have been used in Web-based social media to attract viewers' attention and interests. Expert sources were used predominantly, although typical-consumer sources tended to generate greater viewer interest in cosmetic surgery than other types of message sources. High MSV, moreover, was found to increase a video's popularity.

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