UNIVERSITY PARK, Pa. — An award-winning researcher whose work aims to provide insights on how popular forms of media can shape health attitudes, behaviors and policy support has been named the Donald P. Bellisario Professor of Health Communication at Penn State.

Jessica Gall Myrick, a professor of media studies in the Donald P. Bellisario College of Communications, investigates the ways in which audience emotions can draw people to or push them away from health-related messages. Then, her research tests how these emotions, as well as a mix of emotions and cognitions, shape audience health-related outcomes of media use such as attitudes and behaviors. Since graduating with her doctoral degree in mass communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 2013, Myrick has published more than 80 journal articles and a solo-authored book in these research areas.

While traditional research on the role of emotions in health communication focused largely on fear appeals, Myrick’s work has added to the field by expanding the range of emotions that researchers test to better understand audience responses to health messages. This work has looked at emotions ranging from hope and curiosity to schadenfreude and inspiration. In particular, Myrick’s work seeks to reveal how popular forms of media, often overlooked by researchers in the past, can affect different types of audiences’ feelings, thoughts and behaviors regarding health issues.

“In the past, researching topics like the effects of celebrity health news on women or how social media content shapes our emotions has been seen as trivial, but I am really drawn to understanding how the most popular types of media can affect our well-being,” Myrick said. “That’s because far more people see a People.com story about a celebrity cleanse diet or look at a meme about coping with the stress of the COVID-19 pandemic than will typically read even the most popular New York Times article on any given day.

“In this way, popular media act like de facto public health campaigns, and we need more information about what features of these messages are persuasive for behavior change or may have unintended consequences that public health practitioners then need to mitigate.”

Myrick’s work has shown that audience responses to health messages are important not just for individual behavior change, but also for changing social norms, public stigma, and even policy support for topics ranging from cancer and nutrition to mental health and child abuse.

“It is really important to me that we do the type of research that shows us how to effectively reach all types of people with accessible, motivating health messages via popular media channels, even for topics that we would rather avoid like our own mortality or the ways in which society does not provide effective health infrastructure for racial minorities, women, children and LGBTQIA+ people,” Myrick said.

Others have recognized the importance of Myrick’s work, too. Her research has been funded by the National Institutes of Health and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At Penn State, she has been a Page & Johnson Legacy Scholar with the Arthur W. Page Center for Integrity in Public Communication, a Faculty Fellow with the Social Science Research Institute, and a member of the health messaging team of the interdisciplinary Data4Action initiative. In 2022, Myrick was named the Lewis Donohew Outstanding Health Communication Scholar by the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication, an award that goes to the scholar deemed to have had the most impact on the field in the previous two years.

“Dr. Myrick’s work is important as we consider the ways public-health campaigns can reach and impact individual behavior,” said Dean Marie Hardin. “The recent COVID pandemic made it clear that Dr. Myrick’s work is essential if we are to tackle large-scale public-health issues that require attitude and behavior change.”

Myrick regularly gives public talks, speaks with journalists, and writes for public-facing outlets about social science and media effects. Her 2022 publication with Robin Nabi and Nicholas Eng on the effects of COVID-19-related memes on stress received more media attention than any of the other 20,000 articles published in the field of communication that year.

Myrick also serves on the editorial boards of the journals Health Communication, Mass Communication & Society, Communication Monographs, and Science Communication. In addition to her research and public engagement activities, Myrick mentors doctoral students in the Bellisario College and teaches both undergraduate and graduate courses related to media effects, research methods and health communication.

Funding for the professorship was part of the $30 million gift from Donald P. Bellisario and his wife, Vivienne. At the heart of that gift was a scholarship fund for communications students, with first preference given to undergraduates who are U.S. military veterans, active-duty service members, reservists and members of the National Guard. The gift also included support for programs and faculty, along with funds to help launch the Bellisario Media Center, which opened for students at the start of this academic year.

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Myrick, a co-funded faculty member in Penn State's Institutes of Energy and the Environment, is one of five faculty members with professorships across a variety of disciplines named and supported by the Bellisarios’ gift. The others include Mary Beth Oliver, the Bellisario Professor of Media Studies, and Fuyuan Shen, the Bellisario Professor of Advertising. Also, two Donald P. Bellisario Career Development professorships are held by Pearl Gluck in the Department of Film Production and Media Studies, and Dave Wozniak in the Department of Advertising/Public Relations.

Prior to arriving at Penn State in 2017, Myrick was an assistant professor at Indiana University, where she had previously received her bachelor’s degree in political science and master’s in journalism.