Tara McManus (Communication Studies) co-authored the paper, "PRISM and Emotions: Understanding the Role of Fear and Hope toward Vaccine Information Seeking Intentions," published in Health Communication with lead author Julie Volkman of Bryant University, and fellow co-authors Ashleigh Day of Northern Arizona University and Kristen Hokeness and Chris Morse, both of Bryant University.

The results indicate that, when considering vaccine information, practitioners and message designers should not ignore the emotional state of their target audience, nor should they ignore the specific emotions people experience in response to vaccines. In particular, if messages can be designed to influence people’s risk perceptions and emotional states, message designers should be seeking to induce hope in people as hopeful emotional responses (as opposed to fear responses) was a more direct path to increasing intentions to seek vaccine information. Message designers also might use social norms to create a sense that knowledge about vaccines is socially popular, for example, to encourage information seeking, as results indicated that people’s need for knowledge was more influential on intended information seeking than their level of knowledge.