Medical tourism (MT), sometimes referred to as health tourism or medical travel, involves both the treatment of illness and the facilitation of wellness, with travel. Medical tourism is a multifaceted and multiphase process involving many agents and actors that requires careful planning and execution. The coordinated process involves the biomedical, transportation, tourism, and leisure industries. From the communication perspective, the process can be viewed as a 5-stage model consisting of the: (a) orientation, (b) preparation, (c) experiential and treatment, (d) convalescence, and (e) reflection phases. Medical tourism is uniquely situated in a nexus of academic literature related to communication, business and management, travel and tourism, policy and law, healthcare and health administration. Communication permeates and perpetuates the medical tourism process and does so at the levels of interpersonal interactions (provider-patient communication), small group (healthcare teams), organizational (between healthcare providers), and mass and computer-mediated communication (marketing, advertising, and patient social support). This process may, in some cases, involve high rates of international and intercultural variation. Further study of the MT process can help to gain a better understanding of how healthcare consumers evaluate information about medical procedures and possible risks, as well as the specific message features and effects associated with various communication channels and information delivery systems. Continuing scholarly efforts also should focus on the relationship between medical tourism and communication.
41-50 of 797 Results
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Medical Tourism and Communication
Alicia Mason
Article
Virtual Reality Horror Games and Fear in Gaming
Tammy Jin-Hsuan Lin
Fear is a basic human emotion important for survival and for staying alert to potential danger. In psychology, fear is defined as a discrete emotion to help humans adapt to the environment and serves as a signal for potential danger to help humans avoid or prepare for such threats. While fear is typically experienced through real-world threats as a natural response for survival, modern society also exposes us to fear through mediated content like movies and news. Interactive media, such as video games and virtual reality (VR), have emerged as new ways to experience fear because of their immersive environments. Researchers have discovered that people have similar reactions to both real-life and mediated threats. Previous studies have explored the reasons and methods behind how people experience fear through media. With advancements in technology, researchers have also examined the emotional impact of interactive media, such as video games and VR.
This article examines fear elements, fear reactions, and coping reactions in video games and VR. Results indicate that horror games are the most likely to elicit fear responses in video games, and participants often experience greater cognitive than physical reactions. In VR, research has shown that elements that make players feel realistic inside the games, termed plausibility illusion elements, are most effective in eliciting fear. Players’ reactions toward the VR horror games include active approach strategies, or a constant reminder that the VR events are not real; directly disengaging physically and mentally; and other self-help coping strategies. In addition to immediate fear during VR-horror gameplay, some players showed residual fear on the day after they finished playing the game, indicating that the Tetris effect is strong in VR-horror games. Overall, the empirical evidence in existing gaming literature show that emotional responses are greater in VR than in non-VR video games. The literature also explores the appeal of horror games, and their mechanisms are reviewed. By understanding the fear responses of audiences in video games and VR, researchers and the industry can design effective intervention and training materials.
Media-elicited fear, mediated fright, is reviewed, followed by the appeal of horror games. Game elements from the design perspective to discuss various elements in horror games that may elicit fear are also reviewed. Fear reactions, negative emotions experienced in horror games and other game-related elements such as music and soundtrack, virtual environment, game characters’ appearance, and their facial expressions, all contributed to the fear emotion among players. The discussion of unique affordances and traits of VR and its implications conclude the article.
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Cognitive and Interactive Mechanisms for Mutual Understanding in Conversation
Ashley Micklos and Marieke Woensdregt
Everyday conversation is, as the term suggests, a frequent and seemingly effortless phenomenon. However, when closely examined, it is seen that the process of achieving mutual understanding in conversation involves both complex social reasoning and finely tuned interactive mechanisms. Referential communication provides an excellent case study for what makes everyday language interactions complex: people recruit an intricate web of cognitive capacities and interactive resources in order to get their message across. In terms of cognitive capacities, reaching mutual understanding in conversation involves social reasoning in order to establish common ground and take into account one’s conversational partner when producing and interpreting utterances. Specifically, people continuously adapt to their conversational partner by keeping track of what information is or is not shared (based on the situational context, preceding discourse, and general knowledge) and adjusting their utterances and interpretations accordingly. In terms of interactive resources, mechanisms that allow us to keep a conversation on track (e.g., backchannels) and the mechanisms that allow us to recover from breakdowns in communication (i.e., repair) contribute to mutual understanding. Specifically, other-initiated repair, a conversational phenomenon that has been documented cross-linguistically and observed in experimental settings, is an interactional resource for (re)establishing intersubjectivity between interlocutors. The historic separation between cognitive capacities on the one hand and interactive resources on the other hand has created an artificial divide, when in fact both mechanisms interact with, and even presuppose, one another. This article puts forward a unified perspective on the cognitive and interactive mechanisms for mutual understanding, moving towards better understanding of the complementary roles of these mechanisms in interaction.
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The Ethnic Heritage of Party Politics and Political Communication in Lusophone African Countries
Susana Salgado and Afonso Biscaia
The processes through which ethnicity becomes visible are varied, and its impacts have not always been the same throughout history. Investigating the roles ethnicity played in Angolan, Mozambican, Cape Verdean, and São Tomé and Principean histories makes clear that colonizers themselves placed different emphases on the relevance and the role of ethnicity in these countries. Currently, partly due to the traumas engendered by decades of conflict in Angola and Mozambique, ethnicity is mostly a silent factor, operating in the ways people interact with one another but not overtly mentioned by politicians. The insular nations’ (Cape Verde and São Tomé and Príncipe) history with ethnicity is different from that of their continental counterparts, – partly due to the influence of Creoleness – but is not devoid of tensions; nevertheless, politicians from both archipelagic countries tend to downplay the influence of ethnicity, even if its effects can also be occasionally but subtly felt. More recently, mainstream political discourses focused on the idea of the “unitary nation” are being paired with those of spontaneous movements advocating the valorization of local cultures and languages, which are being boosted by the use of social media.
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Cognitive Skills Acquired From Video Games
Emma G. Cunningham and C. Shawn Green
Due to the massive engagement with video games worldwide in innumerable forms and iterations, researchers have sought to understand the impact playing video games might have on the human brain and behavior. Although research on video games resides in a vast array of disciplines, including social, developmental, clinical, and educational psychology, this work focuses on research specifically in the cognitive sphere. From early research providing sound evidence for the positive impacts of action games on perceptual cognitive skills, to recent work refining methodologies for differentiating the effects of a wide range of embedded mechanics within broader game genres, the field has addressed a number of increasingly complex and critical questions. Research in the field has explored the effects of many game genres’ unique mechanics and in-game goals. Specifically, studies have found that action games positively impact perceptual skills as well as higher-order attentional control and executive function skills, while game genres that utilize action-oriented mechanics including Action-Role Playing Games and Real Time Strategy games also induce similar effects, if to a lesser extent. These results have been observed both through correlational studies, where player status is an existing characteristic of participants, and through intervention studies, where novice participants are trained on a specific game to establish causality between game play and cognitive performance. Although less research has been dedicated to the effects of puzzle games, playing such games has been found to impact higher cognitive skills such as problem-solving and fluid intelligence. Building upon this body of work, future research should explore the cognitive impacts of a more diverse set of game types, in-game experiences, and cognitive constructs as well as the mechanisms through which they are impacted. This should include work dedicated to the effects of puzzle and mini games, and the impact of games on higher cognitive skills including planning, problem-solving, and fluid intelligence, where relatively little research has been dedicated in the past. Further, research should explore the differences in training outcomes from games, between immediate transfer of skills from training to test and the enhancement of the meta-skill of “learning to learn.” Together, such work will allow game play to continue to evolve from pure entertainment to a force for good.
Article
The Hierarchy of “Othering”: Belarusian Media Practitioners’ Accounts
Galina Miazhevich
Belarus—a western periphery of the former Soviet Union—remains overlooked by the scholarly research. Regarded as the periphery to an integral Russian imperial state, rather than a colony proper, Belarus remains a blind spot in post-Soviet identity studies. Generally overlooked or overshadowed by the two larger neighboring states of Ukraine and, especially, Russia it attracts attention for the type of governance established by its current president, Lukashenka, or its “undeveloped” national identity. However, this article goes beyond this formulation of Belarusian identity in negative terms, which views the country as a “denationalized nation” or emphasizes its anachronistic “Sovietization” or Sovietness . It advocates repositioning “Belarusianness” at the core of the post-Soviet experience as a unique case illuminating the dilemmas of post-Soviet nationhood and the enduring legacies of Soviet multiculturalism.
Belarusian multiculturalism is a complicated notion because it largely draws on the imperial/Soviet legacy of a multipeopled state (mnogonarodnoe) in a relatively homogenous Belarusian society and “a tolerant nation” mythology, devoid of links to western liberalism. Consequently, it is expected that the “hierarchy of othering” will include prejudices toward prime “post-imperial targets” such as Roma and Caucasians (in contrast to more distant foreigners). Pro-Western sentiment will be primarily associated with homosexuality. There will be a complex relationship with a “significant” other—Russia—which has more pronounced grassroots ethnic tensions. The tension between the state’s nation-building project and Belarusian revivalism (frequently treated as oppositional nationalism) will contribute to auto-xenophobia or “othering” of a (part of) titular Belarusian nation.
The country’s particular multicultural context informed by the Soviet legacy and its current nation-building strategies can (a) illuminate broader trends also applicable to other neighboring states such as Russia, as well as (b) inform a wider discussion on the mediated populist othering in the post-Soviet region. By drawing on 15 interviews with the sub/editors of the key Belarusian state and independent media outlets, the article introduces an original “hierarchy of othering”—a distinct order of mediated populist othering where certain groups or differences are seen as more or less acceptable. The high level of the state’s involvement in media and the establishment’s mantra of “tolerant” Belarus make the mediation of populist othering problematic. In a situation of “weak hegemony”, the Belarusian establishment had to artificially instill a consensual power balance from above. As a result, media practitioners’ narratives combine a rigid reiteration of the establishment’s line of multicultural “tolerance” together with the contradictions and inconsistencies that expose grassroots xenophobia.
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Mediating Multiculturalism in Postcolonial Southeast Asia
Jason Vincent A. Cabañes
A nuanced understanding of how media matter in the diverse articulations of multiculturalism across the globe requires one to have a transnational sensibility. This is a scholarly disposition that entails being attuned to the role that different media platforms and genres play not only in how racial hierarchies of different societies are articulated, but also in how these hierarchies get entangled with each other. Although the literature about media and multiculturalism is already well established, it is often situated in the context of the West. These works understandably tend to be concerned with the mediation of multicultural issues that are most relevant to their situation, such as the legacies of empire and of settler colonialism. A transnational sensibility consequently necessitates an expansion of current discussions about media and multiculturalism beyond the West. Doing so can allow for a better understanding of how media get entwined with the distinct issues of cultural diversity that have emerged from a wider range of contexts. It also opens up an important vista from which to explore how the mediation of multicultural issues in different parts of the world might be linked to each other, and sometimes intimately so.
A productive site to think through such a transnational sensibility to media and cultural diversity is the global cities of the Southeast Asian region. These places are exemplary of postcolonial multiculturalisms that are distinct from the kind of multiculturalism that can be found in the global cities of West. This article consequently juxtaposes two urban contexts that represent divergent approaches toward the mediation of colonially rooted cultural diversity. One is the city-state of Singapore, where there are overt public policies about managing plurality. The second is the Philippines capital of Metropolitan Manila (henceforth, Manila), where there is a general elision of public talk about plurality. The article takes a comparative lens to these two cities, assessing how their different mediations of postcolonial multiculturalism are entangled with broader global dynamics, including with each other.
Article
Perceptions of the Childfree
Elizabeth A. Hintz and Rachel Tucker
Being voluntarily childless (i.e., “childfree”) is a growing trend in the United States and around the world. Although most childfree people know early in life that they do not wish to become parents, the decision to forgo having children is an ongoing process that requires childfree people to construct a life that deviates from the normative family life cycle. Increasing rates of voluntary childlessness is a trend spurred by a variety of shifting social, economic, and environmental factors. Yet despite the increasing normalcy of voluntary childlessness, childfree people (and especially childfree women) face social sanctions for deciding not to become parents, being broadly perceived more negatively than childless people (who do not have children but want them) and parents. Such sanctions include social confrontations in which others (e.g., family members) question or contest the legitimacy of their childfree identity. Media coverage of voluntary childlessness forwards the notion that motherhood and femininity are inseparable and that voluntary childlessness is an issue that primarily concerns and affects women. Furthermore, childfree people face discrimination in health care contexts when seeking voluntary sterilization and in workplace contexts when “family-friendly” policies create unequal distributions of labor for those without children. Members of the childfree community use the Internet to share resources and seek support to navigate challenging interactions with outsiders. Beyond this, although some studies have begun to interrogate the roles of geographic location, race, and sexual orientation in shaping the experience of voluntary childlessness, at present, a largely White, wealthy, able-bodied, cisgender, heteronormative, and Western view of this topic is still perpetuated in the literature.
Article
Alternative Media and Ethnic Politics in Kenya
Susan M. Kilonzo and Catherine Muhoma
The history of the use of alternative media in Kenya’s politics shows evidence that it was in use in 2007, when the country came into the brink of a genocide; and, prominently in use, in the recent 2022 general elections. The development of fiber optic cable, and availability of Internet connection, with expanded use of mobile telephony in the country, is a direct link to the change in political dynamics, and increased use of social media. Subsequently, the availability of alternative media has revolutionized political engagements by enhancing participatory approach while connecting marginalized populations to the political elite. The new wave of alternative media also strengthens the arguments that politics and political processes are no longer for the elite. Further, the new wave of social media can also be used to explain changes seen in the use of ethnicity as a card for mobilization as well as demobilization in political processes surrounding elections. Campaigning and canvasing is no longer bounded by geographical spaces. Ethnic coalescing is not just a physical phenomenon. Mobile telephony and the Internet, which facilitate connection to alternative media platforms allows for virtual spaces for ethnic meetings and discussions. Anyone, even in remotest areas of the country, is able to participate in political debates and forums so long as they can afford a smart phone, and/or Internet connection. The former physical political processes and engagements, especially during campaigns, elections, tallying and acceptance or rejection of results, and which were perceived to be highly sensitive given the ethnic politics that has characterized the country for several decades, are now neutralized through virtual representation of facts as well as propaganda. The vibrancy of these activities present the research arena with a rich field of vignettes from alternative media accounts in the form of Twitter, Facebook and Blogs, to exemplify how ethnic groups align to their preferred candidates, specifically the Presidential contestants. This kind of approach allows for unveiling of an era of e-democracy and e-politics, developments that were otherwise impossible a few years back. Such platform allows for an exposé of a discourse that shows that, social media platforms may be possible tools for reducing physical violence and neutralizing extreme ethnicity as seen in the surprising calmness witnessed after the Supreme Court of Kenya upheld the contested 2022 election results.
Article
Conflict and Newspapers (De)-Escalation of the North-South Polarization of Polio-Eradication in Nigeria: Implications for Sustainable Conflict Resolution and Peacebuilding Initiatives
Olusola Oyeyinka Oyewo and Ayanfeoluwa Oyewo
Since Nigeria’s inception as a nation in 1914, Nigerian society has been deeply polarized along a north-south dichotomy. This divide has resulted in a lot of conflicts between the north and the south. This divide manifested in various sectors of Nigerian society, including the media. The current media, especially the print media in Nigeria, are produced and published predominantly in the south, with a few in the north. As a result, the media constantly reproduce social norms, stereotypes, and prejudices from southern Nigeria to the chagrin of the North. Media researchers contend that the Nigerian media heighten the current pressure in the country through one-sided reporting dependent on religious, political, and social inclinations. Of the many conflicts that have plagued the nation, the focus here is the polio eradication crisis of 2013, which resulted in the deaths of health worker volunteers during a routine polio vaccine exercise. This violence was a direct result of vaccine refusals on religious grounds by people in northern Nigeria. These refusals were informed by claims that polio vaccines contained anti-fertility properties that were designed by the “West” to reduce the Muslim population of the world, beginning with northern Nigeria.
Based on the peculiarities of the Nigerian print media, the coverage of the polio eradication controversy by two newspapers—Punch and Daily Trust—following the killings of the health workers is worth studying. Daily Trust is situated in northern Nigeria, while Punch is situated in the South. The decisions of these newspapers depend on the contention that the Nigerian press has been blamed for raising pressure in the country, since they see numerous parts of the Nigerian reality from the focal points of religious, political, and cultural biases. The locations of the newspapers determined their positioning in the struggle between the federal government and northern Nigeria related to the polio eradication initiative. Although Punch and Daily Trust newspapers are based in the South and North, respectively, by emphasizing the negativity of the North’s vaccine refusals and the killings of the health workers, they both contribute to the animosity between North and South in their representations. A study of the two may be useful to extrapolate the wider news media operations in Nigeria.
