Eliciting emotional responses to mass media messages can be an effective means of changing public health attitudes, intentions and behaviors. This conceptual paper proposes that emotional responses to such media messages can be message-referent, plot-referent, and/or self-referent. Self-referent emotional responses are expected to have a direct effect in motivating behavior change, particularly...

We investigated the validity of self-reporting of genital symptoms amongst rural women attending primary health care clinics in rural KwaZulu-Natal. Random samples of 226 women were interviewed to measure self-reporting (unprompted), prompted and pelvic examination findings of genital symptoms. Against the presence of any STI self-reporting (unprompted) of symptoms had a sensitivity of 46.1%, s...

We test in the context of a dictator game the proposition that individuals may experience a self-control conflict between the temptation to act selfishly and the better judgment to act pro-socially. We manipulated the likelihood that individuals would identify self-control conflict, and we measured their trait ability to implement self-control strategies. Our analysis reveals a positive and sig...

The knowledge account of assertion (KA) says you may assert Q only if you know Q. Many objections have been raised against KA (e.g. Weiner 2005, Douven 2006, Lackey 2007, Hill and Schechter 2007, Levin 2008, Kvanvig 2009, and Brown forthcoming). Here I’ll focus on one objection in particular, and offer a response. A major part of the case for KA is an explanatory argument from conversational pa...

6 Cognitive impairments prevent older adults from using powered 7 wheelchairs due to safety concerns, thus reducing their mobility and 8 independence. An intelligent powered wheelchair is proposed to help 9 restore mobility, while ensuring safe navigation. Machine vision and 10 learning techniques are used to help prevent collisions with obstacles, as 11 well as provide navigation assistance th...

Self-constructed external representations are thought to be beneficial in teaching and learning, especially when embedded in peer interactions, and can positively affect the course and type of reasoning, for example by providing grounding for explanations and self-explanations, by helping to disambiguate students’ mental models of phenomena, or by increasing and sharing the task focus. This pap...