Uncategorized

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…

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…

HCAT wins COVID seed grant

HCAT won funding from the Immunology, Inflammation, and Infectious Disease Initiative (i3) at the University of Utah. The funding provides support for a repeated, cross sectional study that will track perceptions of COVID communication across 18 weeks. Notably, we are interested in whether people felt COVID messages were exaggerated. HCAT members Andy J. King (Iowa…

Top Paper in BEA Research Division

HCAT lab received some great news in January: a paper we submitted to the Broadcast Education Association (BEA) conference will receive a top paper award. Specifically, our paper, “Who is more vulnerable to visual manipulation?: Traits and individual differences related to the visual manipulation test,” was named the 1st Place Winner in the Research Division Paper open…

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…

Summer 2019: Seven New Datasets

In Summer 2019, HCAT lab collected 7 new datasets. Rachael Katz was working on a new CIO dataset for her MA project. Helen Lillie launched the third study in the melanoma death narratives research program. Sean Upshaw developed stimuli to help underserved populations identity a rare form of melanoma (ALM). Liz Giorgi and Julia Berger…

HCAT Day Retreat

With the NCA submission deadline looming, HCAT lab decided to have a day retreat in the new Gardiner Commons building. What a great building! We arrived at 9 am and wrote until 5 pm. I’m always surprised at how much we get done in a single day devoted to writing. This will be the first…

Manu publishes article in Journal of Behavioral Medicine

Manu published the first article from her dissertation in the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. The article compared the persuasive impact of five types of skin cancer visuals, including ultraviolet photos. She found that ultraviolet photos increase fear, relative to other skin cancer visuals, and that fear mediates the pathway between exposure to ultraviolet photos and…

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

 

 

Nordic House Writing Retreat in Park City

HCAT lab held another writing retreat October 11th – 14th, 2013 in Park City, UT. The writing retreat was held at a 5 bedroom cabin in Deer Valley that described itself as the Nordic House (you can rent it here). Eleven faculty and graduate students attended the retreat. I led a workshop on Lisrel and confirmatory factory analysis, Lisa Guntzviller led a workshop on bibliography software, and Rob Yale took us all out to dinner at the Blue Iguana (which would become a writing retreat tradition). We also discovered numerous quirks such as my love of high quality scrap paper and Kevin Coe’s need to have lots of gum on hand while writing. Finally, Rob Yale impressed everyone (as he tends to) with an amazing suitcase.

We worked on 12 manuscripts during the writing retreat, 7 of which were finished by end. We played an excessive amount of shuffleboard.

 

IMG_4409 1399424_10101325049946158_587402951_o IMG_4497 IMG_4482 IMG_4465IMG_4396 1398305_10101325574290368_1137803858_o

Jake goes to China

In 2008, I journeyed to China as part of a delegation from Purdue University. We attended a Health Communication conference, met with several universities, and traveled.   Fun Fact: I was a Political Science and East Asian Studies major in college. The latter focused on Chinese history, culture, and language.