Assessing adolescents’ critical health literacy: How is trust in government leadership associated with knowledge of COVID-19?

This study explored relations between COVID-19 news source, trust in COVID-19 information source, and COVID-19 health literacy in 194 STEM-oriented adolescents and young adults from the US and the UK. Analyses suggest that adolescents use both traditional news (e.g., TV or newspapers) and social media news to acquire information about COVID-19 and have average levels of COVID-19 health literacy. Hierarchical linear regression analyses suggest that the association between traditional news media and COVID-19 health literacy depends on participants’ level of trust in their government leader. For youth in both the US and the UK who used traditional media for information about COVID-19 and who have higher trust in their respective government leader (i.e., former US President Donald Trump and UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson) had lower COVID-19 health literacy. Results highlight how youth are learning about the pandemic and the importance of not only considering their information source, but also their levels of trust in their government leaders.

It is the same headline, just not as believable: The role of expectancy violations in perceptions about news attributed to multiple sources

Expectancy violations play important roles as heuristics in communication processes, yet prior research has focused more on incongruence between (news) sources and messages rather than assessing expectation levels as a mechanism for variations in message believability. An online experiment indicated that news headline believability for both a prominent daily newspaper and a religion news wire service was largely determined by an interaction between source trust and the extent to which news consumers were surprised of the headline’s origin.

Communication Factors Influencing Flood-Risk-Mitigation Motivation and Intention among College Students

When attempting to communicate flood risk, trust in and perceptions toward risk information dissemination as well as individual efficacy factors can play a significant role in affecting risk-mitigation motivation and intention. This study seeks to examine how risk communication, risk perception, and efficacy factors affect evacuation motivation and behavioral intentions in response to a presumed flood risk, as based on a conceptual framework guided by protection motivation theory. An online survey was administered to college students (N = 239) from a region that is subject to sea level rise and storm surges. Path analysis results indicate that, while less information-source trust predicts greater risk perception, greater information-source trust predicts greater mitigation-information-seeking intention, lower self-efficacy, and stronger response efficacy. As lower mitigation-information-seeking intention similarly predicts greater risk perception, greater mitigation-information-seeking intention also predicts stronger response efficacy. Significant predictors of evacuation motivation include lower risk perception as well as greater information-source trust, severity perception, and response efficacy. Implications of these findings are discussed in terms of information dissemination channels, messaging strategies, and recent severe flooding events.

Source Trust and COVID-19 Information Sharing: The Mediating Roles of Emotions and Beliefs About Sharing

Health information sharing has become especially important during the COVID-19 (coronavirus disease 2019) pandemic because people need to learn about the disease and then act accordingly. This study examines the perceived trust of different COVID-19 information sources (health professionals, academic institutions, government agencies, news media, social media, family, and friends) and sharing of COVID-19 information in China. Specifically, it investigates how beliefs about sharing and emotions mediate the effects of perceived source trust on source-specific information sharing intentions. Results suggest that health professionals, academic institutions, and government agencies are trusted sources of information and that people share information from these sources because they think doing so will increase disease awareness and promote disease prevention. People may also choose to share COVID-19 information from news media, social media, and family as they cope with anxiety, anger, and fear. Taken together, a better understanding of the distinct psychological mechanisms underlying health information sharing from different sources can help contribute to more effective sharing of information about COVID-19 prevention and to manage negative emotion contagion during the pandemic.

Regarding the evidence-based use of micronized progesterone

An issue of habitual miscarriage poses a high social importance especially during COVID-19 pandemic. Meanwhile, healthcareworkers faced a mass media campaign against using micronized progesterone upon habitual miscarriage, which, as viewed by us, displays signs of prejudiced data manipulation and may disorient practitioners. In this Letter we provide objective information on accumulated data regarding gestagenes efficacy and safety. We invoke healthcare professionals to make decisions deserving independent primary source trust presented by original scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals, clinical recommendations proposed by professional medical communities as well as treatment standards and protocols.

An Efficient and Credible Multi-Source Trust Fusion Mechanism Based on Time Decay for Edge Computing

With the development of 5G, user terminal computing moves up and cloud computing sinks, thus forming a computing fusion at the edge. Edge computing with high-efficiency, real-time, and fast features will become part of 5G construction. Utilizing distributed computing and storage resources at the edge of the network to perform distributed data processing tasks can alleviate the load on the cloud computing center, which is also the development trend of edge computing. When a malicious node exists, the error information feedback by the node will affect the result of local perception decision. To solve the problem of malicious behavior of the node, a node trust evaluation mechanism of interactive behavior is introduced. The trust mechanism for edge computing network environments is introduced as a novel security solution. First, the key thought of the trust mechanism proposed in this paper is to establish a trust relationship between edge nodes in open edge computing environment. Then, a multi-source trust fusion algorithm based on time decay aggregates direct interaction trust and different third-party recommendation trust to calculate the global trust of the evaluated nodes. Finally, simulation experiments show that the algorithm has a certain degree of improvement in computational efficiency and interaction success rate over other existing models, which reduces the situation of malicious node deception.