ACHC researchers awarded at ICA 2020

Published on May 22nd 2020 – Two ACHC researchers, Leonie Westerbeek and Christin Scholz, won awards at the 70th International Communication Association (ICA) conference. Leonie Westerbeek (now PhD student) was awarded the Amanda L. Kundrat Thesis of the Year Award by the Health Communication division for her master thesis “Combatting Online Misinformation Regarding Vaccinations: The Influence of a Warning Tool on Information Choice and Information Attitude”. 

Leonie won the award for her master study in which she found that displaying a traffic light indicative of information reliability can guide parents towards choosing a larger amount of reliable information regarding vaccines. This manipulation was tested for parents at varying decision stages and with varying pre-existing attitudes towards vaccines. The master thesis was supervised by Hanneke Hendriks.

In addition, the paper “Using Neuroscience to Causally Manipulate Information Sharing” by Christin Scholz, co-authored by Elisa Baek and Emily Falk, was selected as a Promising Young Scholar Paper by the Information Systems division. In this study, the authors tested an experimental manipulation that was designed to causally affect health news article sharing online irrespective of content characteristics like emotionality or novelty. The manipulation was based on the recent neuroimaging literature regarding the neural correlates of information sharing.

Read more here about Scholz’ work at the ACHC Communication, Brain & Society lab: www.cobras-lab.com

Link to conference website: https://www.icahdq.org/page/ICA2020