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Xiaoli Nan

Photo of Xiaoli Nan

Professor, Communication
Director, Center for Health and Risk Communication

(301) 405-0640

2102 Skinner Building
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Education

Ph.D., , University of Minnesota

Research Expertise

Health Communication
Persuasion

Curriculum Vitae

Dr. Xiaoli Nan is a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and professor of Communication Science at the University of Maryland-College Park, where she is the director of the Center for Health and Risk Communication. Dr. Nan is an affiliate professor in the Department of Behavioral and Community Health, a faculty associate of the Joint Institute for Food Safety and Applied Nutrition, and a full member of the Marlene and Stewart Greenebaum Comprehensive Cancer Center's Population Science Program.

 

Dr. Nan’s research centers on the science of persuasion, or the study of how individuals form or change beliefs and attitudes, and how these mental states are shaped by persuasive communication. Dr. Nan applies the science of persuasion to understand the effects of health communication, misinformation, emerging media, and advertising and social marketing. Dr. Nan’s interdisciplinary work tackles pressing public health challenges such as cancer prevention, vaccination, pandemics, climate change, and food safety and nutrition. At Maryland, Dr. Nan regularly teaches courses on health communication, persuasion and attitude change, media effects, and quantitative research methods.

 

Dr. Nan has published extensively in her areas of specialization with over 80 peer-reviewed journal articles. Dr. Nan’s work appears in top communication and interdisciplinary journals including Human Communication Research, Communication Research, Health Communication, Journal of Health Communication, Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly, Journal of Advertising, Marketing Theory, Health Education, Social Science and Medicine, and Vaccine.

 

Dr. Nan has been a Principal Investigator or Co-Principal Investigator on grants awarded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH), the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s (DOE) Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy (ARPA-E), the Food and Drug Administration, the Department of Agriculture, and the Department of Homeland Security, totaling over $8.5 million. She has served as a PI on three NIH-funded projects on cancer communication strategies targeting under-served populations. Dr. Nan’s current funded research addresses public health messaging on HPV and COVID-19 vaccination.

 

Dr. Nan has been a senior editor for the journal Health Communication since 2018 and serves on the editorial boards of several academic journals including Human Communication Research, Communication Research, the Journal of Health Communication, and the Journal of Advertising. She was an elected member of the executive committee of the Communication Theory and Methodology Division of AEJMC and served on the research committee of the American Academy of Advertising. Dr. Nan previously served as the Vice-Chair and Chair of the Health Communication Division of the National Communication Association.

 

Dr. Nan is the recipient of several awards including the Mayhew Derryberry Award (honoring outstanding contributions to health education research theory and recognizing outstanding behavioral scientists) from the Public Health Education and Health Promotion Section of the American Public Health Association (2018), the Lewis Donohew Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award from the Kentucky Conference on Health Communication (2020), and the Outstanding Health Communication Scholar Award from the Health Communication Division of the National Communication Association (2022).

For more information about Dr. Xiaoli Nan, visit www.xiaolinan.com.

Nan Graduate Advising Philosophy

Publications

Understanding the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among Black Americans: implications for vaccine communication

Examination of the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among Black Americans

Communication

Author/Lead: Kathryn Thier
Contributor(s): Yuan Wang, Xiaoli Nan
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Clement Adebamowo, Shana O. Ntiri, Sandra Crouse Quinn
Dates:
JCH

Guided by the 5C (confidence, complacency, constraints, calculation, and collective responsibility) model of vaccination behavior, we examine the psychological antecedents of COVID-19 vaccine acceptance (i.e. attitudes and intentions toward COVID-19 vaccination) among Black Americans, a group disproportionately affected by the coronavirus pandemic.

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Defining Health Misinformation

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), we are entering an age of “infodemics,” with misinformation leading to mistrust in health authorities, increasing risk-taking behaviors, and undermining public health responses.

Communication

Author/Lead: Yuan Wang
Contributor(s): Kathryn Thier, Xiaoli Nan
Dates:
Combating Online Health Misinformation

According to the World Health Organization (WHO), we are entering an age of “infodemics,” with misinformation leading to mistrust in health authorities, increasing risk-taking behaviors, and undermining public health responses (WHO 2020). While concerns are rapidly growing about the prevalence and harmful impact of health misinformation (Nan, Wang, and Thier 2021), scholars have not clearly defined health misinformation or its components. Without a clear definition and shared agreement on what constitutes health misinformation, comparisons across studies purportedly about health misinformation will remain challenging, hampering our efforts to understand this phenomenon, assess its effects, and design effective interventions. However, defining misinformation in the first place is exceedingly difficult, partly because the benchmarks we often use to diagnose misinformation (eg, scientific evidence and expert consensus) are sometimes moving targets (Vraga and Bode 2020). In light of the ongoing debate about the nature of misinformation and the urgent need for a clear definition of health misinformation, this chapter aims to critically review current definitions of health misinformation, identify key challenges in defining health misinformation, and finally propose a tentative, unifying definition of health misinformation to guide future research. We conclude by discussing directions for future efforts in refining the definition of health misinformation.

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A Scoping Review of Emerging COVID-19 Health Communication Research in Communication and Media Journals

This article reports a scoping review of emerging research on COVID-19 health communication.

Communication

Author/Lead: Tong Lin
Contributor(s): Xiaoli Nan
Dates:
Cover of Health Comm

This article reports a scoping review of emerging research on COVID-19 health communication. We reviewed and analyzed 206 articles published in 40 peer-reviewed communication journals between January 2020 to April 2021. Our review identified key study characteristics and overall themes and trends in this rapidly expanding field of research. Our review of health communication scholarship during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic suggests that health communication scholars have risen to the challenges and interrogated important issues in COVID-19 communication at the individual, group, organizational, and societal levels. We identified important gaps that warrant future research attention including experimental research that seeks to test the causal effects of communication, studies that evaluate communication interventions in under-served populations, research on mental health challenges imposed by the pandemic, and investigations on the promise of emerging communication technologies for supporting pandemic mitigation efforts.

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Public Health Messaging during the COVID-19 Pandemic and Beyond: Lessons from Communication Science

A review of decades of research from the interdisciplinary field of communication science and evidence-based recommendations for COVID-19 public health messaging.

Communication

Author/Lead: Xiaoli Nan
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Irina A. Iles, Bo Yang, Zexin Ma
Dates:
Cover of Health Comm

The COVID-19 pandemic has made it clear that effective public health messaging is an indispensable component of a robust pandemic response system. In this article, we review decades of research from the interdisciplinary field of communication science and provide evidence-based recommendations for COVID-19 public health messaging. We take a principled approach by systematically examining the communication process, focusing on decisions about what to say in a message (i.e., message content) and how to say it (i.e., message executions), and how these decisions impact message persuasiveness. Following a synthesis of each major line of literature, we discuss how science-based principles of message design can be used in COVID-19 public health messaging. Additionally, we identify emerging challenges for public health messaging during the COVID-19 pandemic and discuss possible remedies. We conclude that communication science offers promising public health messaging strategies for combatting COVID-19 and future pandemics.

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Emotion and Virality of Food Safety Risk Communication Messages on Social Media

Study investigates how the emotional tone of food safety risk communication messages predicts message virality on social media.

Communication

Author/Lead: Xiaoli Nan
Contributor(s): Yuan Wang, Leah Waks
Non-ARHU Contributor(s): Lead author: Xiaojing Wang Samantha Stanley, Daniel Broniatowski
Dates:
Header of Journal of Applied Communications

This study investigates how the emotional tone of food safety risk communication messages predicts message virality on social media. Through a professional Internet content tracking service, we gathered news articles written about the 2018 romaine lettuce recall published online between October 30 and November 29, 2018. We retrieved the number of times each article was shared on Twitter and Pinterest, and the number of engagements (shares, likes, and comments) for each article on Facebook and Reddit. We randomly selected 10% of the articles (n = 377) and characterized the emotional tone of each article using machine learning, including emotional characteristics such as discrete emotions, emotional valence, arousal, and dominance. Conveying negative valence, low arousal, and high dominance, as well as anger and sadness emotions were associated with greater virality of articles on social media. Implications of these findings for risk communication in the age of social media are discussed.

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Impact of Self-Affirmation on Responses to Health Warning Messages: Does Consideration of Future Consequences Matter?

An experimental study in which 925 African American smokers were instructed to self-affirm (or not) prior to viewing graphic cigarette warning labels.

Communication

Author/Lead: Xiaoli Nan
Dates:
HC Cover

Self-affirmation theory has inspired numerous studies that have tried to understand the effects of self-affirmation on defensive processing of threatening health messages and subsequent behavior. Despite the overall positive effects of self-affirmation, psychological processes through which self-affirmation exerts such impact remain unclear. We examined Consideration of Future Consequences (CFC) as a potential moderator of the effects of self-affirmation on responses to graphic cigarette warning warnings, in an attempt to shed light on the psychological processes. We conducted an experimental study in which 925 African American smokers were instructed to self-affirm (or not) prior to viewing graphic cigarette warning labels. We found that smokers with stronger present time orientation (PTO) experienced higher defensive responses as measured by anger, perceived message manipulation, and message derogation, after viewing graphic cigarette warning labels; whereas smokers with stronger future time orientation (FTO) reported less message derogation. PTO interacted with self-affirmation in predicting defensive processing measures, such that self-affirmation reduced message derogation at lower levels of PTO and increased message derogation and perceived message manipulation at higher levels of PTO. Self-affirmation also had a conditional indirect effect on smoking intentions and intention to quit smoking through measures of defensive processing. We discuss implications of our study.

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