About the Guest:
Jessica Gall Myrick is a professor of Media Studies at the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. She is also a co-funded faculty member in the Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment. Her research examines the role of different emotions in shaping audience responses to health, science and environmental messages. Her research has been featured by media outlets across the globe. Myrick teaches courses related to media effects, research methods, mass communication and society, and health/science/environmental communication for the Bellisario College.
Episode Transcript:
Leah Dajches: Have you ever clicked on the headline of a news story about a new drug with great potential hoping it might help you? Have you ever seen the headline of a story about a new variant of COVID and avoided it like the plague? If you have, you're not alone. Turns out, the ways we seek out and avoid health information in the news have a lot to do with managing our emotions.
Matt Jordan: According to today's guest, Jess Myrick, hope and helplessness are two feelings that impact what we choose to read and process, especially when it comes to health-related news. She writes for communication to be most impactful people need to feel like there is something we can do about it to make a difference. Her research examines the role of different emotions in shaping audience responses to health, science, and environmental messages. We’re going to talk with her about reporting on health-related news and how misinformation takes hold and spreads. Most importantly, we're also going to talk about what can be done about it.
Leah Dajches: Jess is Bellisario Professor of Health Communication at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, and author of the weekly newsletter Health Media. Her research examines the role of different emotions in shaping audience responses to health science and environmental messages. Her research has been featured by media outlets across the globe. Welcome Jess. Thanks for joining us today. We're really excited to chat with you.
Jessica Myrick: Thanks for having me.
Leah Dajches: So, we'll get right into it. Why don't you start by telling us a little bit about yourself and your research?
Jessica Myrick: Sure. I am the Donald P. Bellisario Professor of Health Communication here at Penn State. And my research looks at the interplay of our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors whenever we see information about health science or the environment. And I used to be a reporter. I actually used to work at a public radio and public television station. And I was just really curious about how some stories I worked really hard on and no one clicked on them on the website or no one really mentioned them. But other stories I'd throw together really fast, and I go to the grocery store and people would say, oh my gosh I heard that thing about the pig. There was this one pig story that I did and everybody wanted to talk about it. And so, I became more and more interested in trying to figure out the psychology of, OK, why do people respond to some media information and not to others? And so, I went back to school. I went to the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and studied health communication there. And so that's what I still try to do is figure out why people respond to different types of health and science messages, and then how also different types of people are going to really shape the responses to any particular message.
Matt Jordan: So, Vivek Murthy, the Surgeon General of the US, just said that health information is a serious threat to public health it can cause confusion sow mistrust harm people's health and undermine public health efforts. Why is health information harmful or misinformation?
Jessica Myrick: Yeah. Well, I'm really glad he said that. I'm really glad that someone as prominent as the surgeon general is bringing attention to the way we talk about health and report on it. And the way doctors talk about it too can do just as much good or harm as bad medicine. Because humans are tricky and we don't always respond to information in the same way. So, when it starts to get just a little bit off, it can have really big ramifications throughout a whole population. And what I mean by a little bit off is you just don't necessarily trust what your doctor said. So, you ask your Aunt Susie and Aunt Susie has these wild ideas. And then you see the same thing that Aunt Susie said on TikTok from someone else who was not a doctor. So, you just have that little bit of reinforcement, and it sticks in your mind. And because we get health information from all these different sources, not just our doctor, or not just some press release from the CDC, or statement by the Surgeon General, we're really often exposed more often to incorrect health information than we are to scientifically sound peer reviewed researched health information. So even just what we would call the dose in media effects jargon is really different for misinformation than for fact checked verifiable information. So that's part of the problem is that you're hearing a lot of things that aren't necessarily accurate. But especially when we hear similar things from different people, it starts to gain momentum. And health is one of those topics that is so personally relevant, we have so many different sources of it. We all kind of feel like we're experts because we have our own lifelong experiences with the health care system and medicine and certain behaviors. So, it's just this combination I guess you could say perfect storm in the case of misinformation that we have a little bit of personal experience. We see it all the time. And we don't necessarily understand the true science of it.
Leah Dajches: This might be a little bit of like a chicken versus the egg kind of question, but is it something about health information and the way that journalists report on it that kind of lends to misinformation or inaccurate information? Or is it on the audience end? Is it the way that we respond to it? Or both I guess?
Jessica Myrick: Yeah. I mean the social scientist in me is going to tell you yes, it's both. Like I said, I used to be a journalist and I was a political science major as an undergrad and then I did a master's in journalism. And there wasn't really a class on this is how you understand p values and clinical trials things that are actually in medical information. So, I think a lot of journalists aren't heavily trained in the sciences. Even a joke when you teach classes like comm majors and journalism majors aren't great at math aren't great at science. So, we do have a lot of really excellent health and science communicators and journalists, but they're not necessarily at every station, at every news outlet. So sometimes people, it's hard for journalists to carefully review the information they're reporting on there's as much time to do it because journalists are stretched thinner than ever. And then also the way that a lot of this medical science comes from universities and there's a press release because a new study has come out. So that there's a new story then about one study. And really that unless that study is a meta-analysis, which is a study of lots of studies, that's not the full picture. And so, then you get these trends like one month there's a study that says coffee is bad, the next month coffee is good. One of the examples I teach about in my classes is that breast cancer screening ages change. And people are like, oh, but they just told me this. And it seems like scientists are making this big shift. Well no. Science is this long iterative self-correcting process and it's not always presented that way because the study about coffee is bad for you is going to get a lot of views. So, it's the nature of science, the nature of journalism training, and then also we are busy. And we hear the things that are interesting, exciting, and/or scary and we move on if it's not. And so, we don't always have time to even attend to the nuances of it.
Matt Jordan: This is kind of related to that Center for Disease Control, we're hoping that this annual kind of COVID booster tied to the flu shot would be a great way to get people to uptake in it and it hasn't. There's less than 3% of eligible Americans have gotten the new booster this fall. And that's down from last year's already abysmal 17%. Vaccine rates aren't high at all among the most vulnerable. So, what's your take on how the news coverage of COVID has contributed to this people tuning it out?
Jessica Myrick: Yeah. I mean, first off, go get your COVID booster. We'll put that message out there. At least I will. I think that's a great question in that over the course of the we're now into year three starting year four, which is hard to believe of news coverage of COVID, and the amount of coverage has definitely gone down. It is very easy to go about your media diet, as I'll call it, and not see a story about COVID. I've started the summer doing a weekly Substack post about health communication. And I wrote one about COVID because I wasn't seeing a lot of it in my own newsfeed and I'm sort of a news junkie. I would see bits and pieces. So, I thought you know what I'll try to summarize it and put that out there, and have people think about, oh, this is still happening. This is still a threat. And in fact, we are seeing increases similar to what we saw in year two. So, it is out there. But we've got so much other stuff going on, as we sit here there are two wars on other continents. And when it's not as urgent, the more urgent stuff is going to bubble to the top of news. Literally news is about new things. And COVID isn't new anymore. A lot of people have gone into their patterns. But sadly, that means the most vulnerable are at more risk. And just as you mentioned, uptake isn't great there. So, there's a lot going on and one reason to explain why people aren't getting the vaccine and one reason is the lack of news coverage because there are more urgent newer things to get our attention. Obviously, I don't work for any political administration so it's hard to say why they're making certain decisions. But they're definitely both in the Trump administration and the Biden administration, you want to say, hey, we were successful.
And so, there's sort of a motivation to not necessarily focus on, hey, this bad thing is still going out there. So, I'm not saying that's on purpose necessarily. But you could kind of see the trend of not highlighting it as often and that makes sense from a political messaging perspective, but not necessarily from a public health perspective. And COVID also caused a lot of other health problems, public health problems, and continuing on with long COVID but also the related cardiovascular diseases. And mental illness related conditions were seen from the trauma of the pandemic and people losing family members. There are a number of orphans in this country due to COVID. And so, I think it's just also I said all these different factors are coming together, people are tired of hearing about it. Vaccine skepticism about COVID also sort of gives people an excuse to not get it because shots hurt. They are not fun. And you know so it takes a lot of effort for most people to get a vaccine. And so, if you put just one little barrier in there, one little mental hurdle, it's going to greatly cut down on the number of people who do it. So, I think pairing it with the flu vaccine is a good strategy. And hopefully maybe as flu season kicks up, more and more people will be like, oh yeah, now that everyone around me is coughing and sneezing I really am going to go get that. But it's got a really big hill to climb.
Matt Jordan: And does that track with the maybe people avoiding it, does it track with your study of how emotions play into this?
Jessica Myrick: Yeah, absolutely. When getting, again, getting a shot is a negative emotional experience. It hurts. And especially people have learned with the COVID vaccine if you've already had a couple that you often feel bad for a day or two afterwards. So, people have to time them well maybe I should get it on Friday, so I'm not knocked out during work. But then you don't want to miss your weekend. So, there's a lot of these sort of little things but they're all negative emotional states. And research shows that when we are stressed out or experiencing some negative emotions we actually don't have as many cognitive resources. We don't feel like doing hard things and this is called the mood is resource paradigm. If you put people in a good mood and then you tell them, hey, you might be at risk of these health conditions, they're much more likely to take that information in and say, OK, what can I do to avoid that risk. If people are in a bad mood and we do this with all sorts of experiments, have them remember something that's bad or right about a stressful time, you say, hey, you're at risk of this health threat, in this case, COVID they're much more likely to get defensive, to rationalize their avoidance of dealing with the threat. So, I think it because it is this particular behavior that is not fun that takes a lot of time and now also can make you feel bad for days. It's just so much that goes into that and you have to have the privilege of being able to take the time off of work or to lose your weekend in order to do it. So, I think it's a combination of the behavior itself isn't fun, doesn't feel good, and right now dealing with a lot of other negative emotions caused by world events caused by inflation. A gallon of milk costs me $6 yesterday. So that all it all makes this perfect storm where it's really hard to motivate people. And we're going to have to be really creative I think from a messaging standpoint, from the health news standpoint, and from even just how we structurally design our health interventions in order to overcome this.
Leah Dajches: Yeah, absolutely. I know when we were talking about the COVID flu vaccine, we were all planning it and like what do we do with our arms, so we make sure it's not sore for a couple of days? But something else that we've been talking a lot about is Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift. And something it is related to the COVID vaccine. I promise y'all. But something I want to share with our listeners is that your research not only focuses on audience responses and reactions to health science and environmental messaging, but you also look at celebrities and influencers and their messaging, particularly related to health information. And so, Matt and I, we were talking about Travis Kelce and Taylor Swift the other day. And people might not know that Pfizer actually teamed up with Kelsey for a 30 second commercial of him getting an updated COVID booster while receiving his annual flu shot. Yet, I read in your newsletter that audience reactions to Kelce's Instagram post were largely negative. And so, I was wondering if you can tell us a little bit about the role of celebrities or influencers in health news and the spread of health information.
Jessica Myrick: Sure thing. You're right, I do study how celebrities influence us and that came about because of my interest in health communication that I noticed that whenever a celebrity announced an illness or passed away from an illness, that illness got so much more attention than any of these planned strategic health campaigns could. So, it really turns into a de facto health campaign. Now this year, the COVID vaccines are being really driven by the pharmaceutical companies for the first time whereas the previous two years they were heavily subsidized by the government. So, they have Pfizer in particular has taken on this route of celebrity endorsement. Non-Swifties might have seen Martha Stewart for instance in a Pfizer ad getting her vaccine along with her flu shot as well. So, they bring instant attention. And you might not care about vaccines COVID might not be the focus of your day. But you are on social media, you are a Swiftie, you are an NFL fan, and so you see this pop up in your Instagram feed. So, it's a better way of getting our attention. But this particular situation is interesting with Travis Kelce because the NFL is a male dominated sport. We do find that women have higher vaccine rates than men and he really attracted a lot of trolls right away. And part of that was the amplification of it by another celebrity, Aaron Rodgers, goes on the Pat McAfee Show. Pat McAfee has been giving Aaron the mic to talk about vaccine conspiracies for a while now and that's a whole audience, and Pat McAfee Show is now on ESPN.
So that anti-vax message and anti-Travis Kelce message gets heavily amplified as well on social media and amongst NFL fans a particular type of NFL Fan who is a fan of Aaron Rodgers. So, it's an interesting sort of it's not just the people were reacting I'd say negatively to Travis Kelce, is that there's another celebrity saying the opposite. Whereas if you have a situation in health communication that was studied a lot and is referenced a lot was when Angelina Jolie prophylactically had a double mastectomy to prevent breast cancer, we saw inquiries about that going up genetic testing going up. There wasn't another big-name a-list Hollywood celebrity say don't do that. But in this case, we have two NFL celebrities saying different things. But what one more thing I'd like to point out about this is that women on the internet are well aware of trolls. And if you did a content analysis of the responses to Travis Kelce's Instagram post, and a lot of them were trolling or saying negative things about the vaccine or about him, that doesn't mean that a lot of women who saw that aren't quietly thinking, oh, you know what? I could get this or why don't I consider it. And so, I would say we need to hold off on seeing how the actual reaction is to it. Because just because the comments were very negative doesn't mean that post didn't make a difference. And in fact, the negative comments from people like that might inspire others to be like, OK, they are clearly hurt about something. Maybe it would be the smart move to not do what these people are saying.
Matt Jordan: If you’re just joining us, this is News Over Noise. I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: And I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: We're talking with media scholar and Penn State professor Jess Myrick about the role of emotion in health reporting and misinformation. So, we've been talking about prescription drugs and kind of ones where you have to go through the mediator of official health. But one of the biggest sources of information about health in the media ecosystem is, of course, over-the-counter stuff. And at the turn of the 20th century, by far, the well roughly half of newspapers entire advertising income came from ads for patent medicine. And we've kind of returned to that a little bit such that if we've talked on the podcast about the news finds me mentality where people give themselves over to the algorithm. And if you're on social media right now, you're going to see a lot of sponsored ads for all kinds of medicines that are over-the-counter for people like I got one on Facebook the other day from Sanjay Gupta, who's the CNN health guy, to promote a product that will clean your arteries in 10 days. There are three before and after images of arteries and an image of a man having a heart attack, right? So how do both the kind of celebrity figures on in relation to that and the kind of social media factor into the explosion of what we might call patent medicine or nostrum medicine, BS medicine that health related stuff that we're seeing right now? Just go crazy.
Jessica Myrick: Yeah. You know, it's a really important topic I think in health communication because it's hard for us to study and measure in a lab and everybody's algorithm is different. You're getting that one I'm getting all of these magic stress relief things and adaptogenic mushroom, gummies, and powders and I bought one I did. I bought this stuff that's coffee with mushrooms in it and it tastes gross. But now I get constant ads and I'm always like, oh, wait. Maybe this would work. Maybe this would be helpful for my stress. And I'm pretty hyper cognizant of health information because I study it. So, I can imagine how overwhelming it is to see it if you're not someone who studies that for a living. And once you give that algorithm, that little feedback of clicking on one thing, then it hits you over the head with it day after day after day. And then to add the extra layer of Sanjay Gupta, who is a medical doctor, who is a he's a brain doctor so I mean I guess you might wonder why he's endorsing an artery cleaner. But it's just these little extra cues and I think what we don't really know the effect of yet is how when you get hit with that day after day. And it's hard to get into a primary care physician right now. It's very hard to make appointments unless you are very sick. So, you can't get in to see your doctor to ask them would this product work. But you see it every day another ad for that. What the heck, it's 40 bucks. I'll try it. And then you fed the algorithm they know you've bought it. And so, you're going to see it again and again. And I think it's just getting to be sort of overwhelming that if you're at all interested in health product, it knows that it records that, and then it just hits you over the head until you buy something. And then that doesn't work so you try another one has a better ad, and you get hit with it days and days and days, and you're worried and it takes advantage of our anxiety to bring it back to emotions. And what can we do? You're already busy, you're well, again, it's just $40. I'll try it. It's just $50. I'll try it. And so, I think that's a little bit of the psychology of what's happening when people see it, I think. One of my collaborators and I always say this a lot that health communication can't solve everything. Good awareness campaigns can't solve everything. And in this case, we live so much on social media, we need the algorithm to be better. We need policies to help encourage for profit social media companies to make the algorithm better. And I'm not Pollyanna. I know that's hard to do and we're not going to completely remove this. But if you can show people that, hey, people get sick of constantly seeing these ads, you would have a better social media experience if you weren't hit over the head with some of this patent medicine, as you call it, type advertising, that maybe you could show them it would be a better commercial product if they had better ads and. Then they could do the corporate social responsibility advertising about, look, we're taking care of you. So, sort of have a compromise point between what would be absolutely best for public health and what would be absolutely best for the commercial entities that run social media or that want to advertise on social media. But I think we need to be more creative in how we propose the algorithm work. But it's really hard. There's a lot of financial interest against that. And so here we are getting your Sanjay Gupta artery cleaning ad every day.
Matt Jordan: Well, I also get I also get ads because I tore my rotator cuff about a year and a half ago. And so, I'm always getting things which will help me cure it, right? So, there's anxiety but there's also hope right. So, what role does hope play in health messaging?
Jessica Myrick: Yeah, that's a great question Hope's a really powerful driver of a lot of our actions. But in particular, a lot of my research and a lot of other people's research has found that when we feel hopeful, we feel more confident that we can cope with whatever the problem is in this case, a bum shoulder, you know. So, it is a huge motivator. But in particular, that pairing of the anxiety with the potential for hope and my colleague and friend Robin Nabi calls this emotional flow. And it does seem to be the more effective way of messaging both for public health circumstances but even in commercial messaging like this. And it's also explained by a concept called cognitive dissonance when you can show people that their attitudes or their behaviors don't align with their values. And here, our product will help you fix that you value your health you value being active and you being able to walk the dog every morning. And so, you want a rotator cuff that works well, shoulder that feels good. Here's an easy solution. And so, it's this combination of giving you the cognitions or the thoughts and showing that they're a little misaligned with what you value. And then that product comes in as the hope to solve that problem. So, it is a really potent formula and in fact, when we talk in public health about if you're going to use a fear appeal for something, please give people hope at the end. Otherwise, they might the anxiety or the hopelessness might lead them to get too defensive to do the behavior you want them to. So yeah, advertisers know this. Unfortunately, advertisers, well maybe not unfortunately, you know, advertisers know what they're doing. It works commercially. And it would be great if we had more resources in public health messaging to deploy the same strategies that advertisers do. Matt, I'm wondering, did you buy the artery cleaner or have you are you going to give it a shot?
Matt Jordan: No, I have not bought. But I have tried all kinds of other homeopathic remedies for blood pressure and everything else because I grew up with a mother who read Prevention Magazine. So, I'm a sucker for patent medicine.
Leah Dajches: Well. so, I'm wondering just like when we come across those advertisements or even news stories in like a magazine like Prevention Magazine, what can we do as readers as consumers to fact check or to kind of register, hey, maybe I should look into who this source is and find out if this is a reputable solution to my problem? Do you have any tips for our listeners?
Jessica Myrick: Yeah, that's a great question. I think do look to see if it's backed by peer reviewed research. And some of them are. Some of these Western medicine has this very biomedical approach of need this chemical prescription drug to get better, and that's not always the case. There are a lot of things that can help. But how much they help is it just really depends. So, look and see is it backed by peer reviewed research if you can get into it. Ask your doctor about it or use the portal. And look at other sources of information. And by that, I mean there are doctors on social media who are reputable. There are a lot of health communicators. And by that, I mean medical professionals who are trying to communicate with the public. And a lot of them do sort of overviews of what are the latest health scams out there. So, start following those people. Because I don't think it's realistic to ask people to go off of social media. And I for one I do learn a lot from social media. There's a lot of psychological benefits of getting to see cute puppies on social media. So, I think finding the sources and really curating your media diet to see, OK, you know, I don't have time to stay up to date with all the stuff. But there are some people who do and I'm going to follow them. So, find trusted opinion leaders in the medical space I think is a sort of practical tip. Try to see if there's research behind these things. And if you do buy it, just accept that it may help you but it's not going to be a miracle cure. None of this stuff is going to be a miracle cure. So, if they are saying that it's probably not true. It's probably way overinflated so don't get your hopes up. Unless you're really good at convincing yourself about placebo effects. So that would be my advice.
Leah Dajches: So, we've talked so far on this episode a lot about health information and where people are getting their news surrounding that. And one place that I really enjoy getting information, health information is actually your newsletter. It released back in August it's called Healthy Media. And we'd love to learn more about and understand some of your goals with the project.
Jessica Myrick: Well, thank you for reading it. It comes out on Friday mornings and I'm usually writing it on Thursdays. And sometimes it's tough to get it done. I'm like, “Why am I doing this is anyone reading it?” So, I'm glad there are at least two readers here. And I wanted to talk about things like the psychology of health communication because there are a lot of pressing health problems in our world that I think communication scholars can contribute to addressing. But not everyone even knows that we exist. So, literally it's a very selfish goal of publicizing the fact that my field exists to people outside of it who are the ones who are getting big NIH grants. And if they can consider the psychology of how, OK, different people have different responses to fear and you need to just telling…scaring them about this health thing isn't going to necessarily change their behavior. So, thinking about really just advertising for more thoughtful, more scientifically informed health communication interventions to tack on to the amazing public health and medical work that's already going on.
Matt Jordan: Well, we look forward to reading more of it. Jess, thanks so much for talking to us today. We really appreciate it.
Jessica Myrick: Yeah. Thanks for having me. Thrilled to be here.
Matt Jordan: That was really interesting and really helpful as somebody who is always googling my own symptoms this gives me something to think about before I go down the rabbit hole and buy some the next quack piece of medicine.
Leah Dajches: Yeah, this was a great chat with Jess Myrick. And I think my big takeaway and tip for our listeners is sign up for her newsletter, Healthy Media. Please sign up it has tons of great information. It's hopeful, it's truthful. So, sign up. That's it for this episode of News Over Noise. Our guest was Jess Myrick, Bellisario Professor of Health Communication at Penn State's Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications. To learn more and to hear an extended version of this interview with additional content, download the podcast at wherever you subscribe to podcasts, or at news-over-noise-dot-org. I'm Leah Dajches.
Matt Jordan: And I'm Matt Jordan.
Leah Dajches: Until next time, stay well and well-informed.
Matt Jordan: News Over Noise is produced by the Penn State Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications and WPSU. This program has been funded by the Office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
[END OF TRANSCRIPT]
Episode Credits:
Producer: Lindsey Whissel Fenton
Audio Engineers: Mickey Klein, Scott Gros, Clint Yoder
News Over Noise is a co-production of WPSU and Penn State’s Bellisario College of Communications. This program has been funded by the office of the Executive Vice President and Provost at Penn State and is part of the Penn State News Literacy Initiative.
