College student gratitude: A silver lining while evaluating a yearlong bathroom stall messaging campaign.

OBJECTIVE: Mental health concerns of college students are on the rise, prompting a need for communication campaigns to address ways to assist students. The current campaign utilized weekly bathroom stall messaging to address five key themes developed by a university's mental wellness task force.Participants: Undergraduate students at a large Midwestern university.Methods: A survey at pre and post-campaign implementation.Results: No significant shifts in attitudes, and only one significant behavioral increase (i.e., reaching out to academic advisers), were revealed. One silver lining was that college students were found to express gratitude to someone new a median of 5 times per month. Gratitude tended to be displayed most recently to those in their social circles, and primarily for receiving instrumental support.Conclusions: Narrowing the focus of future mental wellness campaigns is recommended. Additional recommendations for developing future mental wellness campaigns are also addressed.

When Doctors Swear, Do Patients Care? Two Experiments Examining Physicians Cursing in the Presence of Patients.

Swearing in everyday conversation has become more normalized in recent years; but less certain, however, is how accepting Americans are when a doctor swears in their presence. Two online experiments (Study 1: n = 497; Study 2: n = 1,224) were conducted with US participants to investigate the impact of a doctor swearing in the course of examining a patient's infected wound (i.e., "You've got a lot of nasty [shit/stuff] in there that we're going to want to flush out"), or swearing when dropping papers in a patient's presence while varying the intensity of a swear (i.e., "[Shit!/Damn!/Whoops!]"), with or without an apology (i.e., "I'm sorry"). Overall findings reveal a main effect for swearing, with a swearing doctor generally seen as less likable, and in Study 1, less trustworthy, approachable, and less of an expert. However, the majority of participants exposed to a swearing doctor still said they would visit that physician again. Open-ended responses from these participants revealed that they perceived a swearing doctor as more human. Results from Study 2 also found that if a doctor swore, the negative impact was lessened if the doctor apologized immediately after cursing. While results from these studies indicate it is wise for doctors to refrain from swearing, most participants were still willing to make a future appointment with a cursing doctor.