Departmental News
Nan Receives GRB, ICA Top Paper Awards
Assistant professor Xiaoli Nan has received a summer grant from the General Research Board at the University of Maryland. The award provides release time and research support. Nan will use the award to pursue research on a project entitled "Assessing the Impact of Perceived Risk and Perceived Efficacy on Cancer Information Seeking: A Cross-Sectional and Experimental Investigation."
This project will examine the influence of two psychological factors – perceived risk (e.g., “how likely will I get cancer?”) and perceived efficacy (e.g., “is there anything I can do to prevent cancer?”) – on people’s motivation to seek out cancer information. Both secondary data analysis and experiments will be employed to answer the research question. This project will contribute to a limited body of literature that examines the psychological antecedents of information seeking behavior. Results of this project will likely hold significant implications for health behavior theory, persuasion theory, cancer communication research, as well as developing effective health campaign messages aimed at motivating health information seeking.
Nan has also been awarded a Top Paper designation from the Information Systems Division of the International Communication Association. The paper is entitled "The Influence of Incidental Discrete Emotions on Health Risk Perceptions and Persuasion," and will be presented at the May, 2009 ICA convention in Chicago.
