One of the best ways to identify melanoma is using the ugly duckling sign (UDS) technique. The UDS technique teaches patients to look for the “ugly duckling” – a mole that is atypical for the patient. You can see HCAT Lab’s new UDS brochure and pamphlet here.
HCAT Lab develops innovative materials to help patients identify melanoma, including patient brochures, pamphlets, and videos. We recently completed a series of studies that yielded new materials to teach patients how to identify melanoma using the ABCDE technique. You can read more about the materials, and download them here.
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.…
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…
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 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…
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…
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…
HCAT lab was featured in Sky Magazine (again). Sky Magazine is the magazine that you encounter on Delta flights. In the summer, they like to do stories that talk about skin cancer prevention. Here is the story that features HCAT from June 2018: Tailor-made Cancer Care
Every year, NIH New Innovators are invited to Bethesda to present our research. This year, I presented some of our work on UV photography. We were the first poster visible through the door of the session. The face of the symposium, if you will. 🙂
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…
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…
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…
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.…
Utah has the highest rate of melanoma in the U.S. Given that, Deseret News recently published a long-form story about melanoma in the…
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 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…
Our lab has been with ultraviolet (UV) imagery for several years. We are currently conducting several studies were we study public reaction to these images. Here is a photo of me in visible light. And here is a photo in UV light.
I created this infographic to teach people about federal funding of cancer research. As a cancer researcher, I would like to see more money devoted to fighting the illness of our time. But it’s more than that: I would like to see our budget parallel the problems of our society. That said, the infographic isn’t an…
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.
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.
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).
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.
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…