While substantial studies focus on risk and negative factors for problematic video gaming, the present study paid attention to protective and positive factors that lead to healthy gaming practice. Based on the self-determination theory (SDT), the present study investigated whether psychological needs satisfaction may facilitate players’ adherence to protective gaming beliefs and behaviors. With a survey among 737 video game players, Study 1 observed a positive association between psychological needs satisfaction and protective gaming beliefs and behaviors. Study 2 used the positive writing technique to promote players’ psychological needs satisfaction, and the players with enhanced autonomy and competence need satisfaction showed a higher adherence to protective gaming beliefs and behaviors. The findings imply that players’ autonomous motivation and self-perceived competence can play a role in healthy gaming practice. SDT-based healthy gaming strategies may help to develop practical and sustainable programs for containing problematic gaming and promoting players’ health and well-being.

Despite the theoretical arguments and recent empirical evidence indicating retest correlations to be particularly suitable reliability estimates, usual retest intervals (e.g., two weeks; one month) will underestimate the reliability of measures over the within-session interval in which inter-test relationships are regularly estimated. Consequently, we argue that within-session retest correlations may be particularly useful for estimating the reliability of measures over this interval. Specifically, we show evidence that within-session retest correlations: (1) provide the common upper-limit of internal consistency and retest reliability estimates, and consequently (2) are considerably less susceptible to producing disattenuated correlations greater than 1 in magnitude; (3) better track variation in scale validity correlations than common reliability estimators such as coefficient alpha; and (4) can be estimated for single-item measures. We illustrate this using data collected from several samples on two personality inventories, the Inventory of Individual Differences in the Lexicon (IIDL; Wood, Nye, & Saucier, 2010) and Big Five Inventory-2 (BFI-2; Soto & John, 2017). Results suggest that reliability is typically underestimated and thus overadjusted for in meta-analytic and structural equation modeling contexts, and that greater use of these estimates is thus likely to slow the momentum toward broader constructs and provide sturdier psychometric ground for the measurement of narrower constructs or nuances. More generally, we detail how within-session retest correlations draw better attention to the crucial role of the time interval separating measurements toward determining the appropriate estimates to use when adjusting for the measurement unreliability affecting zero-order correlations.

Problematic gaming may lead to poor mental health and negative social outcomes. Existing harm minimisation strategies predominately focus on school-based education, government legislation, and player protection programmes of the video gaming industry. From the perspective of players, the present research explored and evaluated beliefs and behaviours adopted by players to protect themselves from gaming-related harms. In Study 1, potential protective beliefs and behaviours were identified from focus group interviews among players. A survey was conducted to explore the factor structure of the protective beliefs and behaviours scale (PBBS). Based on parallel analysis, we found three belief factors and two behaviour factors that were negatively related to problematic gaming. In Study 2, the psychometric properties of PBBS were tested. Its factor structure was replicated in the confirmatory factor analysis, and the composite reliability and average variance extracted revealed adequate construct validity. The predictive validity of PBBS was demonstrated by its negative associations with problematic gaming symptoms and impulsiveness, as well as positive associations with self-control, self-esteem, and well-being. These protective beliefs and behaviours seemed to be promising in reducing gaming-related harms. The PBBS would be useful for evaluating players' vulnerability to problematic gaming and providing insights into player-centred prevention strategies.

Background Amidst the COVID-19 pandemic, misinformation on social media has posed significant threats to public health. Detecting and predicting the spread of misinformation are crucial for mitigating its adverse effects. However, prevailing frameworks for these tasks have predominantly focused on post-level signals of misinformation, neglecting features of the broader information environment where misinformation originates and proliferates. Objective This study aims to create a novel framework that integrates the uncertainty of the information environment into misinformation features, with the goal of enhancing the model’s accuracy in tasks such as misinformation detection and predicting the scale of dissemination. The objective is to provide better support for online governance efforts during health crises. Methods In this study, we embraced uncertainty features within the information environment and introduced a novel Environmental Uncertainty Perception (EUP) framework for the detection of misinformation and the prediction of its spread on social media. The framework encompasses uncertainty at 4 scales of the information environment: physical environment, macro-media environment, micro-communicative environment, and message framing. We assessed the effectiveness of the EUP using real-world COVID-19 misinformation data sets. Results The experimental results demonstrated that the EUP alone achieved notably good performance, with detection accuracy at 0.753 and prediction accuracy at 0.71. These results were comparable to state-of-the-art baseline models such as bidirectional long short-term memory (BiLSTM; detection accuracy 0.733 and prediction accuracy 0.707) and bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT; detection accuracy 0.755 and prediction accuracy 0.728). Additionally, when the baseline models collaborated with the EUP, they exhibited improved accuracy by an average of 1.98% for the misinformation detection and 2.4% for spread-prediction tasks. On unbalanced data sets, the EUP yielded relative improvements of 21.5% and 5.7% in macro-F1-score and area under the curve, respectively. Conclusions This study makes a significant contribution to the literature by recognizing uncertainty features within information environments as a crucial factor for improving misinformation detection and spread-prediction algorithms during the pandemic. The research elaborates on the complexities of uncertain information environments for misinformation across 4 distinct scales, including the physical environment, macro-media environment, micro-communicative environment, and message framing. The findings underscore the effectiveness of incorporating uncertainty into misinformation detection and spread prediction, providing an interdisciplinary and easily implementable framework for the field.

The use of traditional medicine is a global phenomenon, and the WHO advocated its appropriate integration into modern healthcare systems. However, there is a hot debate about the legitimacy of traditional medicine among the general public. Here, we investigated the debate in the Chinese digital context by analysing 1954 responses related to 100 questions about traditional Chinese medicine (TCM) treatment against COVID-19 on the Zhihu platform. Attitude function theory was applied to understand the reasons underlying public attitudes.Results showed that Zhihu users generally held a supportive attitude toward TCM. Their attitudes mainly came from their own experience and traditional media. The general users were more negative while medical professionals were more positive toward TCM. Ego defence (eg, derogating evidence sources) was used the most to support attitudes, followed by value expression (eg, believing in science). Supporters showed fewer expressions of faith (eg, the use of TCM is a kind of faith), politics (eg, supporting TCM is about politics) and science value (eg, TCM is a field of science), fewer ego defence, more patriotism and cultural confidence expressions (eg, TCM is a cultural pride) and more knowledge explanation (eg, TCM accelerates the metabolism of phlegm) than expected. Opposers showed fewer utilitarian and knowledge functions, fewer expressions of patriotism and more expressions of faith, politics and economics, but more ego defence functions than expected. Opposing posts were more likely to attract engagement than supporting and neutral posts. Posts that mentioned attitude functions generally attracted more engagement.Our findings indicate that TCM debate in modern China is not only relevant to medical science and health, but also rooted deeply in cultural ideology, politics and economics. The findings can provide global insights into the development of proactive policies and action plans that will help the integration of traditional medicine into modern healthcare systems.

Public perceptions of the police have profound impact on public–police relations and the effectiveness of policing practices. Previous research on public perceptions of the police has focussed on citizens’ socio-demographic profile (e.g. age, race) and police officers’ visual characteristics (e.g. attire), but scant attention has been paid to the impact of accent. The purpose of this research is to investigate the effect of accent on perceptions of the police. In a matched-guise experiment, 160 participants rated officers on their police professional and aesthetic traits after listening to their speeches performed in standard Chinese versus Chinese with a regional accent. The results showed that police officers were rated higher on all the traits when they spoke standard Chinese than accented Chinese, and gender may play a moderating role. The present study revealed that accent can be powerful in affecting the public image of the police.

Purpose - This study aimed to investigate the relationship between spirituality, including religious spirituality (i.e. supernatural beliefs) and secular spirituality (i.e. social beliefs), and mental health among police trainees.Design/methodology/approach - Participants in this study were police trainees of a police academy. An online survey was conducted to measure spirituality and mental health among these police trainees. The association between spirituality and mental health was analyzed using hierarchical linear regression and hierarchical logistic regression with demographic variables (i.e. gender and age) controlled for.Findings - The results revealed that the police trainees with stronger secular spirituality tended to have better general mental health. Higher levels of secular spirituality were significantly associated with lower levels of mental illness risk and suicidal ideation. By contrast, religious spirituality was not significantly related to police trainees' mental health.Originality/value - The present study is the first to empirically investigate the relationship between spirituality and mental health among police trainees. The findings may be enlightening for future research on the mental health of police officers and trainees, and provide novel perspectives and pragmatic implications for the development of spirituality-based prevention strategies and intervention programs for enhancing the mental health and well-being of the police.

Ethnic and racial disparities in the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic raise significant concerns. This study analyzes social media discourses toward four ethnic communities in the United States during the pandemic and reveals disparities in pandemic experiences among them. A total of 488,029 tweets mentioning one of the four ethnic communities, that is, Asians, Blacks, Hispanics, and Native Americans, were investigated by a structural topic modeling approach with emotional expressions and time as covariates in the topic model. The results demonstrate that discourses about Asian, Hispanics, and Native American communities were often induced by pandemic-related events, concerning topics beyond one's community, and reflecting an experience of implicit racism and an adoption of technical supports from health systems. Meanwhile, discourses about Blacks were racially related, discussing topics within the community, and reflecting an experience of explicit racism and an adoption of psychological supports from ingroup. We discuss the implications of our findings on ethnic health disparities.

Concerns have been raised about whether and how groups at high risk of COVID-19 are more likely affected by online vaccine misinformation during the pandemic. This study examined the associations between exposure to online vaccine misinformation and vaccination intention through vaccination perceptions and investigated the moderating role of individuals' socioeconomic status. eHealth literacy was also investigated as a protective factor that mediated the effect of socioeconomic status. A survey of 1,700 Chinese netizens revealed that increased exposure to online COVID-19 vaccine misinformation predicted lower vaccination intention, which was mediated by negative attitudes, lowered subjective norms, lowered perceived benefits, and higher perceived barriers toward vaccination. Socio-economic status (i.e. education, income, and residence), in general, did not guarantee individuals against the negative impacts of vaccine misinformation. eHealth literacy is critical in reducing susceptibility to vaccine misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Social media use for risk communication during the COVID-19 pandemic has caused considerable concerns about an overabundance of information, particularly misinformation. However, how exposure to COVID-19 information on social media can lead to subsequent misinformation sharing during the pandemic has received little research attention. This study adopted the social amplification of risk framework to delineate how exposure to COVID-19 vaccine information on social media can be associated with individuals' misinformation sharing through heuristic information processing. The role of social media trust was also examined. Results from an online survey (N = 1488) of Chinese Internet users revealed that exposure to COVID-19 vaccine information on social media was associated with misinformation sharing, mediated by both affect heuristics (i.e., negative affect toward the COVID-19 pandemic in general) and availability heuristics (i.e., perceived misinformation availability). Importantly, both high and low levels of trust in social media strengthened the mediating associations. While a low level of trust strengthened the association between exposure to COVID-19 vaccine information on social media and the affect heuristics, a high level of trust strengthened its association with the availability heuristics, both of which were associated with misinformation sharing. Our findings suggest that heuristic information processing is essential in amplifying the spread of misinformation after exposure to risk information on social media. It is also suggested that individuals should maintain a middle level of trust in social media, being open while critical of risk information on social media.

Existing research indicates that social media overload, as an emerging phenomenon, has become prevalent among college students and caused unfavorable consequences. However, few studies have emphasized the detrimental effects which social media overload plays on international students in higher education. To address this gap, this current investigation combines quantitative data with the stressor-strain-outcome (SSO) paradigm to explore how social media overload impacts international students' educational attainment. The study proposes that three forms of perceived overload, including information overload, communication overload, and technology overload, may induce international students' academic anxiety and social media exhaustion, which can adversely affect their educational attainment. The conceptual research model is empirically examined by analyzing statistical data collected from 486 Chinese international students who actively utilize social networking sites. Results demonstrate that information overload and communication overload could indirectly undermine international students' educational attainment via the mediation of social media exhaustion and academic anxiety. Moreover, this research also identifies that social media exhaustion could significantly trigger academic anxiety among international students. Consequently, this research complements theory-driven empirical research on the phenomenon of social media overload by employing the SSO framework and revealing the mechanism through which perceived overload affects the educational attainment of international students. The results obtained contribute to a better comprehension of the adverse consequences of SNS usage from the perspective of perceived overload, further providing fresh insights into how multiple stakeholders can reduce these unfavorable aspects through effective measures.

National health departments across the globe have utilized persuasive strategies to promote COVID-19 vaccines through Twitter. However, the effectiveness of those strategies is unclear. This study thereby examined how national health departments deployed persuasive strategies to promote citizen engagement in COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets in six countries, including the UK, the US, Germany, Japan, South Korea, and India. Guided by the heuristic-systematic model and the health belief model, we found that national health departments differed significantly in the use of systematic-heuristic cues and health belief constructs in COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets. Generally, the provision of scientific information and appeals to anecdotes and fear positively, while appeals to bandwagon negatively, predicted citizen engagement. Messages about overcoming barriers and promoting vaccine benefits and self-efficacy positively affected engagement. Emphases of COVID-19 threats and cues to vaccinate demonstrated negative impacts. Importantly, health departments across countries often used futile or detrimental strategies in tweets. A locally adapted evidence-based approach for COVID-19 vaccination persuasion was discussed.

Mobile media is an emerging factor that may affect children’s dietary behaviors in the family environment. However, little research has examined associations between mobile media use and children’s food intake within family units. Particularly, though studies have suggested that parents’ mobile media use can affect parental mediation and distract parenting, few have examined the interpersonal associations between parents’ mobile media use and their child’s food consumption while controlling for the interdependence between parents and children. Adopting the actor-partner interdependence model, this research investigates the dyadic associations between mobile media use and food consumption in parent-child dyads. A cross-sectional survey was conducted in Singapore with a national sample of 291 children aged 7–18 years and their parents (i.e., 291 parent-child dyads). Daily mobile media use and daily healthy and unhealthy food intake were measured for both children and parents. Findings demonstrated that parents’ mobile media use was associated with both their own and their child’s healthy and unhealthy food intake. In addition, children’s mobile media use was associated with their own unhealthy food intake but not healthy food intake after controlling for covariations of variables between parents and children. Findings were generally consistent across children’s age groups. This research suggests that parents’ mobile media use has substantial impacts on their child’s eating behaviors, and children’s healthy food intake may be better explained by parental influences than by their own mobile media use. This study provides new insights into children obesity prevention efforts based on reduced mobile media use in the family environment.

As the most important global news distributors, the big three international news agencies’ reports about COVID-19 vaccines have a great influence on people’s understanding of them. Based on the health belief model (HBM), we examined which constructs in the HBM were related to audiences’ Twitter engagement and the differences among the agencies. We content-analyzed 1162 COVID-19 vaccine-related tweets from three international news agencies’ Twitter accounts (@AFPespanol, @AP, @Reuters) from 2 December 2020 to 31 January 2021. The results showed that the most-used HBM construct was barriers, followed by benefits, susceptibility, cues to action, severity, and self-efficacy. About half of the tweets used a positive tone and nearly half of the tweets used a neutral tone, while only 3.1% of the tweets used a negative tone. Reuters used a significantly more negative tone, more neutral tone, and less positive tone than was expected. AFP used a significantly more positive tone and less neutral tone than was expected. The effectiveness of utilizing HBM constructs for vaccination promotion strongly depends on the audience context. The use of HBM constructs for vaccination was generally effective for Reuters but seems to have backfired for AFP.

Background Public sentiments are an important indicator of crisis response, with the need to balance exigency without adding to panic or projecting overconfidence. Given the rapid spread of the COVID-19 pandemic, governments have enacted various nationwide measures against the disease with social media platforms providing the previously unparalleled communication space for the global populations. Objective This research aims to examine and provide a macro-level narrative of the evolution of public sentiments on social media at national levels, by comparing Twitter data from India, Singapore, South Korea, the United Kingdom, and the United States during the current pandemic. Methods A total of 67,363,091 Twitter posts on COVID-19 from January 28, 2020, to April 28, 2021, were analyzed from the 5 countries with “wuhan,” “corona,” “nCov,” and “covid” as search keywords. Change in sentiments (“very negative,” “negative,” “neutral or mixed,” “positive,” “very positive”) were compared between countries in connection with disease milestones and public health directives. Results Country-specific assessments show that negative sentiments were predominant across all 5 countries during the initial period of the global pandemic. However, positive sentiments encompassing hope, resilience, and support arose at differing intensities across the 5 countries, particularly in Asian countries. In the next stage of the pandemic, India, Singapore, and South Korea faced escalating waves of COVID-19 cases, resulting in negative sentiments, but positive sentiments appeared simultaneously. In contrast, although negative sentiments in the United Kingdom and the United States increased substantially after the declaration of a national public emergency, strong parallel positive sentiments were slow to surface. Conclusions Our findings on sentiments across countries facing similar outbreak concerns suggest potential associations between government response actions both in terms of policy and communications, and public sentiment trends. Overall, a more concerted approach to government crisis communication appears to be associated with more stable and less volatile public sentiments over the evolution of the COVID-19 pandemic.

While studies have documented the difference between political and public discussions on Chinese social media platforms, few have interrogated and compared how state and social media companies shape corresponding public spheres across different platforms. Building on research concerning socially mediated publicness, we advance the understanding of the public sphere in China as a communicative space in which the (Party-)state carries its power into society, with the platform as the structural designer and facilitator of this mediated public sphere. We further examine empirical data from the official accounts countering COVID-19 fake news on two dominant social media sites, Weibo and WeChat, between December 1, 2019 and April 30, 2020. Semantic content analysis of these posts reveals that the two social media sites showed distinctive socially mediated public spheres in terms of authoritative actors, topics and content, and media frames. The results shed light theoretically and empirically on the heterogeneity and complexity of socially mediated public spheres in Chinese cyberspace.

The rapid spread of preliminary scientific evidence is raising concerns on its role in producing misinformation during the COVID-19 pandemic. This research investigated how the communication of uncertainty about preliminary evidence affects the spread of its inferred misinformation in a Weibo case study. In total, 3439 Weibo posts and 10,380 reposts regarding the misinformation of pets transmitting COVID-19 were analyzed. The results showed that attitude ambiguity toward the preliminary evidence and the stage when the evidence was first released with uncertainty were associated with higher numbers of likes and retweets of misinformation posts. Our study highlights the internal sources of misinformation and revisits the contextual perspective in misinformation studies.

BACKGROUND Examining public perception of tobacco products is critical for effective tobacco policy making and public education outreach. While the link between traditional tobacco products and lung cancer is well established, it is not known how the public perceives the association between electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) and lung cancer. In addition, it is unclear how members of the public interact with official messages during cancer campaigns on tobacco consumption and lung cancer. OBJECTIVE In this study, we aimed to analyze e-cigarette and smoking tweets in the context of lung cancer during National Cancer Prevention Month in 2018 and examine how e-cigarette and traditional tobacco product discussions relate to implementation of tobacco control policies across different states in the United States. METHODS We mined tweets that contained the term “lung cancer” on Twitter from February to March 2018. The data set contained 13,946 publicly available tweets that occurred during National Cancer Prevention Month (February 2018), and 10,153 tweets that occurred during March 2018. E-cigarette–related and smoking-related tweets were retrieved, using topic modeling and geospatial analysis. RESULTS Debates on harmfulness (454/915, 49.7%), personal experiences (316/915, 34.5%), and e-cigarette risks (145/915, 15.8%) were the major themes of e-cigarette tweets related to lung cancer. Policy discussions (2251/3870, 58.1%), smoking risks (843/3870, 21.8%), and personal experiences (776/3870, 20.1%) were the major themes of smoking tweets related to lung cancer. Geospatial analysis showed that discussion on e-cigarette risks was positively correlated with the number of state-level smoke-free policies enacted for e-cigarettes. In particular, the number of indoor and on campus smoke-free policies was related to the number of tweets on e-cigarette risks (smoke-free indoor, r49=0.33, P=.02; smoke-free campus, r49=0.32, P=.02). The total number of e-cigarette policies was also positively related to the number of tweets on e-cigarette risks (r49=0.32, P=.02). In contrast, the number of smoking policies was not significantly associated with any of the smoking themes in the lung cancer discourse (P>.13). CONCLUSIONS Though people recognized the importance of traditional tobacco control policies in reducing lung cancer incidences, their views on e-cigarette risks were divided, and discussions on the importance of e-cigarette policy control were missing from public discourse. Findings suggest the need for health organizations to continuously engage the public in discussions on the potential health risks of e-cigarettes and raise awareness of the insidious lobbying efforts from the tobacco industry.

Background With the World Health Organization’s pandemic declaration and government-initiated actions against coronavirus disease (COVID-19), sentiments surrounding COVID-19 have evolved rapidly. Objective This study aimed to examine worldwide trends of four emotions—fear, anger, sadness, and joy—and the narratives underlying those emotions during the COVID-19 pandemic. Methods Over 20 million social media twitter posts made during the early phases of the COVID-19 outbreak from January 28 to April 9, 2020, were collected using “wuhan,” “corona,” “nCov,” and “covid” as search keywords. Results Public emotions shifted strongly from fear to anger over the course of the pandemic, while sadness and joy also surfaced. Findings from word clouds suggest that fears around shortages of COVID-19 tests and medical supplies became increasingly widespread discussion points. Anger shifted from xenophobia at the beginning of the pandemic to discourse around the stay-at-home notices. Sadness was highlighted by the topics of losing friends and family members, while topics related to joy included words of gratitude and good health. Conclusions Overall, global COVID-19 sentiments have shown rapid evolutions within just the span of a few weeks. Findings suggest that emotion-driven collective issues around shared public distress experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic are developing and include large-scale social isolation and the loss of human lives. The steady rise of societal concerns indicated by negative emotions needs to be monitored and controlled by complementing regular crisis communication with strategic public health communication that aims to balance public psychological wellbeing.