A context-sensitive collectivism during the COVID-19 pandemic: Effect on the adoption of containment measures in China and the US.

This study investigates individuals' adoption of containment measures (e.g., wearing masks) from the perspectives of cultural values and trust in two countries-China and the US. Distinguished from previous definitions that characterise cultural values as rigid and fixed concepts, this study reconceptualizes collectivism to be a context-sensitive construct. With survey data from a collectivism-prevalent culture (China, n = 1578) and an individualism-prevalent culture (the US, n = 1510), it unfolds the underlying mechanism by which collectivism influences people's adoption of containment measures in both countries. Results indicate that institutional trust serves as a significant mediator in this relationship. In both countries, individuals who hold a collectivistic value on the pandemic are more likely to endorse the adoption of containment measures. This endorsement is driven by their trust in public institutions, which stems from their collectivistic values. Additionally, slight distinctions emerge, revealing that collectivistic values directly predict the behaviours among Chinese individuals, whereas such a direct effect is not observed in the US. Practical implications will be offered.

The Impact of Expert Opinions in COVID-19 News Coverage on Vaccination During the Fifth Outbreak in Hong Kong: A Time Series Analysis.

The role of experts in news coverage has become increasingly prominent, but the evidence regarding the effectiveness of expert opinions in affecting public behavior remains mixed. This study seeks to examine the influence of expert opinions covered in the news on the public's response to public health crises. By adopting a macro-level framing perspective, we investigated how framing consistency, a macro-level concept indicating the agreement between expert opinions in news coverage and government policies or among peer experts, evolves over time and its temporal causal relationship with public behavior. Specifically, this study collected all press news coverage in Hong Kong over four months during the fifth outbreak, including 1,416 articles with 650 expert opinions, as well as the vaccination data that paralleled with this period. We constructed time series of expert opinions and vaccination behavior, and then conducted Vector Autoregressive (VAR) models with Granger causality analysis to examine how framing consistency of expert opinions in news coverage influenced vaccination. The results indicate that the consistent framing between expert opinions and government policies increased COVID-19 vaccination during the fifth outbreak in Hong Kong, while conflicting opinions responding to government policies had no significant effect on vaccination. Opinions among medical experts on COVID-19 issues also did not significantly impact vaccination. The implications for designing communication strategies and enhancing public behavioral support during public health crises are discussed.

The Media-Mediated Model of Information Seeking Behavior: A Proposed Framework in the Chinese Culture During the COVID Pandemic.

This study aims to unravel the key determinants of individuals' information seeking behavior during health crises. It challenges conventional perspectives that solely emphasize individual experiences. It also undermines frameworks that draw direct parallels between individual experiences and media factors, disregarding the mediating role of media. Models like the Comprehensive Model of Information Seeking (CMIS) also have limitations as they prioritize media mediation over recognizing the direct impacts of individual experiences on information seeking behaviors. We hereby propose a framework, the Media-Mediated Model of Information Seeking Behavior, that sheds light on the interplay between individual and media experiences. Analysis of survey data involving 5,469 participants in three Chinese societies, including mainland China (n = 2,067), Hong Kong (n = 1,913), and Taiwan (n = 1,489), reveals that individual experiences have both direct and indirect effects on information seeking, mediated by media utility. Experience of symptoms and risk perception depend on people's perceptions of the utility of media, while efficacy and media trust directly influence information seeking behaviors. These findings contribute to theoretical understanding and offer practical guidelines. Public institutions and health promoters can leverage media platforms to shape people's perceptions of health issues and encourage active information behaviors. It is also crucial to prioritize cultivating public trust in media and efficacy during crises.

Go for zero tolerance: Cultural values, trust, and acceptance of zero-COVID policy in two Chinese societies.

This study seeks to explain the wide acceptance of the stringent zero-COVID policy in two Chinese societies-Mainland China (n = 2,184) and Taiwan (n = 1,128)-from perspectives of cultural values and trust. By employing the efficacy mechanism, this study identifies significant indirect effects of trust in government and key opinion leaders (KOL) on people's policy acceptance in both societies. Namely, people who interpret the pandemic as a collectivist issue and who trust in government will be more accepting of the zero-COVID policy, whereas those who framed the pandemic as an individual issue tend to refuse the policy. Trust in government and KOLs foster these direct relationships, but trust in government functions as a more important mediator in both societies. The different contexts of the two Chinese societies make the difference when shaping these relationships. These findings provide practical considerations for governmental agencies and public institutions that promote the acceptance of the zero-COVID policy during the pandemic.

Country/Region Level Pandemic Severity Moderates the Relationships among Risk Experience, Perceived Life Satisfaction, and Psychological Distress in COVID-19.

Scholars and communications practitioners worldwide have sought novel resilience models amid heightened rates of psychological distress caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. We examined perceived life satisfaction as a determinant of resilience. Additionally, we investigated the assumption that perceived pandemic severity at the country/region level moderates structural relationships within our risk-resilience model. Analyzing more than 34,000 valid samples from 15 countries/regions, we found that (1) perceived life satisfaction alleviated psychological distress across all 15 countries/regions; and (2) country/region-level pandemic severity moderated the relationships among COVID-19 symptom experience, perceived life satisfaction, and psychological distress. The effects of COVID-19 symptom experience and perceived life satisfaction on psychological distress were conditional. We discuss possible mechanisms behind our findings and provide practical implications for mitigating psychological distress during public health crises.

Increasing Vaccination: Psychological Characteristics of COVID-19 Vaccine Advocates, Converts, and Resisters in Hong Kong.

This study uses longitudinal data to profile psychological characteristics of COVID-19 vaccine advocates, resisters, and converts. We conducted a two-wave longitudinal survey (Nwave1 = 3190, Nwave2 = 2193) in Hong Kong using stratified quota sampling. Among those who completed both survey waves, 458 (30.5%) were classified as vaccine advocates, 295 (19.7%) were vaccine resisters, and 621 (41.4%) were vaccine converts (who shifted away from hesitancy). Compared to advocates, resisters were more likely to be female, those without children, between 40 and 49 years old, democratic voters, and those with poor health. Highly educated individuals, non-democrats, and those in good health were more likely to convert from hesitancy to acceptance. Public trust in authorities and confidence in vaccine were the primary factors related to vaccine uptake. Those who were more confident in vaccine, those who increased in information consumption and risk perceptions towards the pandemic, and those who decreased in their trust of health professionals were more likely to convert. Our study complements the emerging global picture of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance by focusing on changes in vaccine hesitancy during the pandemic.

Exploring the mediating role of government-public relationships during the COVID-19 pandemic: A model comparison approach.

This study proposed, tested, and compared three models to examine an antecedent and outcome of government-public relationships. It conducted three surveys of 9675 people in mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong from August 2020 to January 2021. The results of the model comparison supported the proposed reciprocal model: not only were relational satisfaction and relational trust found to mediate the effect of perceived responsiveness on people's word-of-mouth intention to vaccinate, but they also had a reciprocal influence on each other. This study further affirmed that the relative effects between satisfaction and trust. We also found that emotion-dominant model is more powerful than cognition-dominant model, i.e., people's feeling of satisfaction happens before sense of trust, which results from their perceived organizational responsiveness and then contribute to their word-of-mouth behavioral intention. The theoretical and practical implications of this study were also discussed.

A Shot in the Arm for Vaccination Intention: The Media and the Health Belief Model in Three Chinese Societies.

This large-sample study of three Chinese societies-Mainland China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong-demonstrates the importance of media exposure for people's vaccination intentions during the COVID-19 pandemic. By employing two constructs (i.e., perceived susceptibility and severity) in the health belief model (HBM), the study identifies significant indirect effects of media exposure on individuals' vaccination intention in all three Chinese societies. That said, media trust negatively moderated the path from perceived severity to vaccination intention in Mainland China and Taiwan. In these two societies, the higher an individual's trust in media, the less influence of perceived severity on his/her vaccination intention. It suggests that the level of trust in media is a contextual factor in explaining individuals' decision-making on health issues. Generally, the combination of the HBM and media trust has been proven to be useful for understanding individuals' vaccination intentions. These findings provide practical considerations for governmental agencies, public institutions, and health campaign designers to promote vaccination in the pandemic.

Framing matters but varies: a semantic network analysis of media representations of post-Fukushima food imports across three Chinese societies.

There is a remarkable gap between scientific experts and the nonscientific public regarding the safety of food imported from nuclear-contaminated areas in Japan. How socio-scientific issues such as post-Fukushima food imports are framed in media discourse may have effects on the way people perceive and reason about potential threats, and, in turn, influence government-initiated policies and regulations. In this study, semantic network analysis is performed to examine the diverse media representations of post-Fukushima food imports across information-seeking sources (mass media and search-based media) and three Chinese societies (Hong Kong, Mainland China, and Taiwan). We found that media representation of the crisis differs across sources and sociopolitical contexts. It is also discussed how these channel-specific and contextual factors may affect public opinion. This knowledge can enhance regulatory authorities' informed decision-making about food safety issues, guide crisis professionals' communication efforts, and call for a more context-sensitive approach to public health crisis management.

An assessment of the relational orientation framework for Chinese societies: Scale development and Chinese relationalism.

How to capture the role of culture in individual behavior is a difficult question, in part because it is often embedded in the research approach. Many researchers have stressed the entrenched ethnocentrism of mainstream psychology approaches. In response, some Chinese scholars have turned to sociology theories to create a relation-centered approach for investigating the psychology of Confucian societies. Scholars in Asia recently have proposed a theoretical model of psychological functioning in Chinese societies that encompasses the individual's sociocultural environment, which they labeled the relational orientation framework (ROF). The ROF is comprised of a structural-relational factor grounded in sociological structuration theory with five dimensions that shape the individual's position in the social network, and a relational agency factor based on social exchange theory with four dimensions that capture the individual's orientation to exchange aspects of relationships. This study assesses the proposed theoretical structure of the model with empirical data. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses with two independent samples from universities in mainland China (N = 601, M age = 20.8 years) supported the structural-relational factor with the expected five dimensions and the relational agency factor with a modified version of the four dimensions with acceptable reliability and validity scores and good levels of model-data fit. We provide recommendations for refining conceptualization of the two factors for future development of an assessment tool.

Crisis communication in context: Cultural and political influences underpinning Chinese public relations practice.

This study analyzes academic journal articles in order to depict the features of Chinese crisis communication in Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Taiwan. The findings revealed the following features of crisis communication in Chinese societies: collectivistic culture, nationalism, rationalism, face-giving/saving, striving for the "golden mean," the preference for passive communicative strategies, and the avoidance of extreme strategies. Nevertheless, the differences in political systems-the ubiquitous intervention by authoritarian government on the Mainland, the mistrust of government in post-handover Hong Kong, and the relatively mature democratic polity in Taiwan all lead to unique crisis communication practices.