HCAT presented multiple papers at NCA 2023, including a Top Paper in the Mass Communication Division. The manuscript reported the results of longitudinal message experiment focused on replotting. May, K., Lillie, H. M. Ratcliff, C. L., & Jensen, J. D. (2023, November). Enacted replotting, narrative persuasion, and colorectal cancer: A longitudinal message experiment with U.S.…
HCAT routinely presents papers at the Broadcast Education Association (BEA). At BEA 2023, we were honored with a Top Paper in the Research Division. Led by Yi Liao, the manuscript reported the results of message experiment testing the theory of empathetic authenticity. Liao, Y., Adams, D. R., Owens, C., & Jensen, J. D. (2023, April).…
HCAT presented multiple papers at NCA 2021, including a Top Paper in the Health Communication Division. Led by Manu Pokharel, the manuscript reported the results of biophysiological research of UV imagery. Pokharel, M., Jensen, J. D., John, K. K., Christy, K. R., Taylor-Burton, S., & Upshaw, S. (2021, November). Visual communication and skin cancer prevention:…
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…
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…
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 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.…
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 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…
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…
All our summer grant writing is paying off. We just received word that our NIH P30 grant will be funded this cycle. This grant will fund a state-wide survey of Utah adults to study a number of cancer-related variables, including cancer information overload. The opportunity to continue our research on cancer information overload is…
Manu will attend the NCA Doctoral Honors Seminar in July 2018 at Vanderbilt University. She will present all three studies from her dissertation program, and work to refine the project for the job market. NCA Doctoral Honors Seminar
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.…
Year 2 of my NIH New Innovator grant is coming to a close. This is a 5 year grant, so we still have a long way to go. I’m writing our annual report, and it’s amazing how much we’ve done…and how much we still have to do. A 5 year project is a program of…
I will receive the Krieghbaum Under 40 Award at the the AEJMC awards ceremony, August 11th at 10 am. It’s a wonderful honor, and all are welcome to come out celebrating with us in Chicago. The Krieghbaum Under-40 Award honors AEJMC members under 40 years of age who have shown outstanding achievement and effort in all…
The psych reactance crew won the top paper at the DC Health Com Conference!
Approximately 20 years ago, I had the pleasure of participating in Montana High School Speech & Drama. I competed in Humorous Duo Acting with my good friend, Rusty Limesand. He had a great sense of humor, and an amazing threshold for physical pain (which came in handy given our love of vaudevillian comedy).
My senior year, we were lucky enough to win the state title in Humorous Duo Acting, and to take home the team state championship in Drama.
After high school, Rusty became a prison guard, and a cell extractor (they guy who removes unruly prisoners from their cells).
I went to college and won a national championship in collegiate speech and drama, before continuing forward for my Ph.D.
We were an odd pair in many ways. He was a jokester, who loved big, physical comedy. I was more cerebral, and liked writing more than anything else. I always wrote our routines, an approach that would put me against the grain in college speech and drama (where it is rare for people to write their own material).
Sadly, Rusty passed away in 2011 (in a bizarre turn, his story was part of an episode of Dateline NBC). But I still have lots of great memories of him, humorous duo, and our time together. Thinking back on it, 20 years later, it seems like another life.
Mindy Krakow and I traveled to BEA this year to present research and receive a few awards. Mindy received an award for her dissertation (congrats Mindy!) and we won a top paper in the research division (congrats us!). We also enjoyed stopping by NAB and learning more about VR equipment. Nokia was there, so it was a great opportunity to chat with them about our new camera.
Plus we went to two great shows: La Reve and Ka.
I competed in collegiate forensics (also known as speech and drama) at Concordia College from 1997 – 2001. It was a great educational experience, and a wonderful way to develop as a writer.
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.
Our research on the delay hypotheses (aka, the Sleeper Effect) won a Top Paper Award in the Mass Communication Division of NCA. Jensen, J. D., Bernat, J. K., Wilson, K., & Goonwardene, J. (2009, November). Narrative persuasion and the sleeper effect: Further evidence that fictional narratives are more persuasive over time. Paper presented at…
Dan O’Keefe and I received the Distinguished Article/Book Chapter in Health Communication from NCA’s Health Communication Division. The award was for our meta-analysis of loss/gain framing research. That project took several years to complete, and yielded multiple publications, but our analysis in Journal of Health Communication seemed to have the biggest impact. I learned a…
Ryan Hurley and I were lucky enough to win Top Student Paper in Mass Communication at NCA in 2004. Originally, we wrote two papers: one that focused on the third person effect and another than examined the impact of reading news coverage about environmental threats, including dioxin (which, incidentally, won Top Student Paper in…
