Cancer

Helen honored with Susan Cooper Jones Endowed Fellowship in Cancer Research

Helen Lillie was awarded the prestigious Susan Cooper Jones Endowed Fellowship in Cancer Research. This award honors an outstanding fellow, PhD, MD or MD/PhD, who has performed exceptional cancer-focused research during their training at the Huntsman Cancer Institute. The award is made possible by the generosity of the family of Susan Cooper Jones, a young mother who lost…

Helen publishes multiple articles on Communication & Emotion

Dr. Helen Lillie is an NIH Postdoctoral Fellow in HCAT Lab, and she has been publishing up a storm. Her primary research program focuses on communication and emotion. Helen has published lead-authored articles in Psychology & Health, Journal of Family Communication, and a book chapter in Communicating Science in Times of Crisis: Coronavirus. All of…

HCAT wins Utah Grand Challenge Grant

HCAT just won a Utah Grand Challenge grant. This mechanism provides funding for cancer researchers to address pressing cancer issues facing the state of Utah (and beyond). Utah leads the nation in Melanoma incidence (in a bad way). Given that, our project will develop and test and innovative approaches to melanoma detection in coordination with…

Manu wins Miller Dissertation Award

Manusheela “Manu” Pokharel (Ph.D., 2019) was recently awarded the Gerald R. Miller Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award from the National Communication Association. Pokharel received her doctorate in communication in May 2019 from the University of Utah and is currently an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at Texas State University. The Gerald R. Miller award…

Courtney win Early Career Scholar Award from HCD

Courtney Lynam Scherr will receive the Early Career Scholar Award from the Health Communication Division of NCA in November 2020. We are so proud of Courtney! This award celebrates early career researchers with exceptional productivity and programs. Her research on communication and genetics is outstanding, and a great representation of what health communication researchers do.…

NIH R01 to study Personalized Messaging

Led by Yelena Wu, we recently won an NIH R01 grant to support a 5 year health intervention targeting sun safe behavior in Utah adolescents. The goal of the grant is to evaluate a multi-school intervention designed to decrease skin cancer. The study will run from 2020 through 2025. The intervention includes multiple components including…

New CIO article published in PEC

Several years ago, HCAT published an article focused on cancer information overload (CIO). In that article, we proposed a measure for the construct, examined psychometric properties, and compared it to Powe’s measure of cancer fatalism. As a follow-up, we recently published another article examining a refined version of the CIO scale. Both articles can be…

Sean Upshaw joins HCAT as a Postdoc

  Dr. Sean Upshaw recently joined HCAT lab as a Postdoctoral Fellow after completing his PhD at Howard University in health communication. Sean has a background in graphic design and illustration with a BPS in Biomedical Illustration from the University of Memphis. As an HCAT Postdoctoral Fellow, Sean will work on designing and evaluating innovative…

March: Dogfight

If you ran into a lab member in March, then we probably looked busy. And Jake was definitely drinking some form of caffeine. That’s because we were working hard to get 7 article submitted to 2 different conferences.  The end of March is home to the submission deadline for the National Communication Association (NCA) and…

Spring: research, research, research

HCAT has lots of research in progress. We are writing IRBs, designing studies, collecting and analyzing data, and writing manuscripts. It’s great to have so much activity in the lab.  Recently, I started using post-it notes to keep track of all the studies in progress. It helps me to visually track the studies and it…

Death narrative research in Health Psychology

Mindy Krakow’s excellent dissertation research on death narratives was recently published in Health Psychology. This research is part of a larger program that seeks to systematically investigate and compare stories where characters live (survivor narratives) or die (death narratives). We start with the assumption that both nareative forms can exert influence; the question is when…

Best Article in Risk Analysis

We just found out our 2017 publication in Risk Analysis was selected as a best article by the editors. The article is: Jensen, J. D., Pokharel, M., Scherr, C. L., King, A. J., Brown, N., & Jones, C. (2017). Communicating uncertainty to the public: How amount and source of uncertainty impact fatalism, backlash, and overload.…

Kevin John’s Dissertation Published in JHC

                    The first article from Kevin John’s dissertation was just published in the Journal of Health Communication. In that article, Kevin articulates a framework for studying how visual images might impact visual skill (what he labels the visual skill acquisition model). He then demonstrates how the…

Kate Publishes Admiration Research in JHC!

                        Kate Christy recently published an article evaluating how admiration and memorability impact the processing of mammography PSAs. The research was published in the Journal of Health Communication (one of our favorite outlets!) and provides evidence that admired models have greater impact on intentions…

Rob Yale’s Battle

  Robert Yale, HCAT lab member and Assistant Professor at the University of Dallas, was recently diagnosed with stage 4 gastric cancer. You can follow his journey here. He has all of our love and support in this battle.  

HCAT lab wins Golden Monograph

The Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards were created to mark NCA’s 50th Anniversary in 1964. Originally, there were awards given to monographs and to books. The book award was deleted and later reinstated as the Diamond Anniversary Book Award. The Golden Anniversary Monograph Awards are presented to the most outstanding scholarly monograph(s) published during the previous calendar year.

My randomized controlled trial published in Social Science & Medicine was honored with the 2015 Golden Anniversary Monograph Award from NCA. You can read more about it here. You can see a list of past award winners here.

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Ultraviolet (UV) Photography at the Museum

We have developed a high performance, monochrome UV camera to advance research in dermatology, public health, and (interestingly enough) the documentation and discovery of historical artifacts. HCAT lab is working with several faculty on the latter initiative, including Professor Rory Becker from Eastern Oregon University. We recently used the camera to photograph specimens at the Utah Museum of Natural History, including scorpions (who glow when exposed to UV)! Rory has also used our UV camera to photograph Neanderthal caves in Croatia (photos to come).

Rory UVcamera Scorpions

 

 

The WORD Intervention

In 2010, we won a subcontract on a Department of Defense/Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Center Grant. Our job was to conduct research to inform the design of an HPV vaccination campaign. To that end, we created experimental stimuli to test threat-to-efficacy ratio hypotheses at the heart of EPPM research. This required the creation of lots and lots and lots of stimuli – one for each ratio combination. Here they are, provided for your use and pleasure. Seriously. Feel free to use them.

 

Here’s the article citation:

Carcioppolo, N.,* Jensen, J. D., Wilson, S. E., Collins, W. B., Carrion, M., & Linnemeier, G. (2013). Examining HPV threat-to-efficacy ratios in the extended parallel process model. Health Communication, 28, 20-28.

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