The study, published in the peer-reviewed journal Communication Research, was led by Jessica Fitts Willoughby, a professor in WSU’s Edward R. Murrow College of Communication, with co-author Stacey J.T. Hust, also a professor in the Murrow College. The researchers designed an online experiment involving 747 college students in Washington State who were shown real cannabis advertisements that had been posted on Instagram. Rather than relying on participants’ recollections of advertising they had encountered in the past, an approach common in earlier cannabis marketing research, the team presented specific, verifiable ads and then measured how each viewer interpreted them. This design allowed the investigators to examine how different people extracted different meanings from the same message and whether those individual interpretations were connected to their expectations about cannabis and their stated intentions to use it before sex.

The advertisements themselves spanned a range of visual themes. Some featured sexual or romantic imagery, including people using cannabis in bed and couples in intimate settings, while others depicted recreational scenes such as friends gathered around a bonfire. After viewing the ads, participants were asked a series of questions: what messages they took from each advertisement, what they expected from using cannabis before sex, and whether they intended to do so. This structure gave the researchers a way to separate exposure from interpretation, two things that earlier studies had often conflated by simply asking people how much cannabis advertising they remembered seeing.

The central finding of the experiment is that interpretation, not mere exposure, appears to be the key variable. Simply seeing a sexual or romantic advertisement did not consistently predict how viewers answered the researchers’ questions. What mattered was what viewers believed the ad was telling them. Students who interpreted an advertisement as suggesting that cannabis use results in better sex were more likely to expect those benefits for themselves, including the expectation that cannabis could improve their sexual experiences or reduce nervousness, and they were also more likely to say they might use cannabis before sex. Crucially, this pattern held whether or not the ad itself featured explicit sexual themes, indicating that the perceived promise of sexual benefit could be read into recreational imagery as well.

Willoughby framed the distinction between exposure and interpretation as central to the study’s contribution. “It wasn’t as simple as seeing a message and automatically being influenced by it,” she said. “The stronger connection appeared when someone interpreted the ad as saying cannabis makes sex better and then they thought it might do the same for them.” In other words, the persuasive pathway ran through the viewer’s own reading of the ad’s implied claim, a mechanism consistent with what researchers have long observed in alcohol advertising, where sexualized appeals can shape how people understand the information being presented. “We know from alcohol advertising that sexualized appeals can make a difference in how people understand the information presented,” Willoughby noted, adding that cannabis is different because “there really aren’t rules saying you can’t tie it to sex.”

The experiment also uncovered meaningful gender differences in how the ads operated. Men who wanted to be like the men depicted in the sexual or romantic advertisements, figures who were typically portrayed as physically fit, attractive, and masculine, were more likely to say they intended to use cannabis before sex. This suggests that for some male viewers, the ads may function through a form of social modeling, in which the depicted consumer becomes an aspirational figure whose behavior the viewer imagines adopting. Women responded to a different dimension of the same messages: those who thought the ads raised concerns about sexual consent were less likely to say they would use cannabis before sex. The same advertising content, in other words, could activate aspirational identification in one group and risk awareness in another, depending on how the viewer processed it.

That divergence carries practical weight for public health communication. Because consent emerged as a lever that shifted women’s stated intentions, health officials seeking to discourage cannabis use before sex may have a concrete messaging strategy available to them. “If health communicators want to address cannabis use before sex, they could create messages that clearly explain how it may affect decision making or consent,” Hust said. “Our findings suggest that those messages could make people, particularly women, less likely to intend to use cannabis before sex.” The finding is notable because it points to a specific, testable content strategy: rather than generic warnings, messages that directly address how cannabis may affect judgment and the capacity to give or recognize consent may resonate with the segment of the audience most responsive to that concern.

The policy implications extend beyond health messaging into the question of how cannabis advertising should be governed. Washington State prohibits cannabis ads aimed at people younger than 21, but the state’s rules do not specifically bar companies from suggesting that cannabis can improve sex or romantic experiences. At the national level, the cannabis industry has no voluntary code comparable to the distilled spirits industry’s guidelines, which have prohibited claims linking alcohol to sexual success since at least the mid-1990s. This asymmetry means that a claim considered off-limits in alcohol marketing for nearly three decades remains an open creative option for cannabis brands advertising on platforms such as Instagram, where young adults, including college students, form a substantial share of the audience.

Hust argues that the study’s results speak directly to that regulatory debate. “The larger question is whether cannabis advertisements should be regulated more like those for other adult-use products, such as alcohol,” she said. “Our findings show that when people interpret these ads as promising positive sexual experiences, that can shape what they expect from cannabis and whether they intend to use it.” The experimental evidence provides a mechanism for that argument: if the persuasive effect depends on viewers reading a sexual-benefit claim into an ad, then rules that restrict such claims, as the alcohol industry’s code does, would target precisely the interpretations the study linked to intentions to use cannabis before sex.

The research arrives at a moment when cannabis legalization has expanded the advertising landscape faster than the norms and rules that govern it. By showing that the same Instagram ads can produce different effects depending on whether viewers see a promise of better sex or a warning about consent, the WSU team has given both regulators and health communicators a more precise picture of how cannabis marketing may influence sexual decision making among young adults. The study, titled “Sex, Romance, or Recreation? An Experiment Testing the Effects of Cannabis Brand-generated Social Media Ads on College Students’ Expectancies and Intentions to Use Cannabis Prior to Sex,” was published in Communication Research on 31 August 2026, and its authors suggest the findings could ultimately help shape both public health messages and advertising policies in what remains a largely unregulated area of marketing.

Subject of Research: An experimental study of how cannabis social media advertising shapes college students' sexual expectancies and intentions to use cannabis before sex.

Article Title: Cannabis ads may shape viewers’ expectations about cannabis and sex

Article References: Cannabis ads may shape viewers’ expectations about cannabis and sex. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: cannabis advertising, social media, sexual expectancies, consent, college students, Communication Research, Washington State University, public health, advertising policy, Instagram, alcohol industry guidelines, experiment

The research, conducted by Daniela Villani, Alice Bologni, Gaia Cuccì, and Anna Flavia Di Natale at the Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan, recruited 54 Italian women aged 18 to 30 through Facebook and Instagram. Participants were randomly assigned either to the self-compassion intervention or to a waitlist control group that received no activities during the study period. Before and after the three weeks, all volunteers completed questionnaires measuring three core dimensions of self-compassion — self-kindness, common humanity, and mindfulness — along with the Photo-Investment Scale, an eight-item instrument capturing how much cognitive effort, emotional worry, and behavioral energy women pour into choosing and editing photos for social media.

The intervention itself was deliberately lightweight. Each week targeted one component of self-compassion as defined by researcher Kristin Neff. In week one, participants listened to a 23-minute Compassionate Body Scan meditation, guiding them to connect with bodily sensations and extend warmth to different parts of their body, and completed a written exercise called Self-Compassion and Our Body, which invited them to appreciate their body while identifying areas for gentle improvement. Week two centered on common humanity through a 20-minute meditation on giving and receiving compassion, paired with a letter-writing task in which participants addressed their perceived inadequacies from the perspective of a compassionate friend. The final week focused on mindfulness, combining a 15-minute meditation titled Soften, Soothe, Allow with a self-compassion journal in which women recorded daily moments of self-judgment and responded to them compassionately.

When the researchers analyzed the data using an intention-to-treat approach with repeated-measures analyses of variance, a clear pattern emerged. Significant time-by-group interactions appeared for self-kindness, common humanity, and photo-investment, with effect sizes of moderate magnitude (partial eta-squared values of roughly 0.08 to 0.09). In practical terms, women in the intervention group became noticeably kinder to themselves, felt more connected to the shared struggles of others, and — crucially — reported significantly reduced photo-investment compared with controls, whose scores barely moved. Only the mindfulness subscale failed to budge, a finding the authors attribute to the brevity of the training: meaningful gains in balanced, non-judgmental awareness of one’s emotions typically require longer and more consistent practice than a single focused week can deliver.

Why would cultivating self-compassion loosen the grip of photo-anxiety? The mechanism, according to the research team, lies in the psychology of self-presentation. Photo-investment is driven by perfectionistic self-presentation — the belief that one’s online image must be flawless to be acceptable — and by harsh self-criticism when reality falls short. Self-kindness directly counters this inner critic, helping individuals tolerate perceived imperfections without depending on appearance-based feedback for their sense of worth. Common humanity, meanwhile, dissolves the isolating conviction that one is uniquely flawed; the letter-writing exercise, in which participants embodied a compassionate friend, appears to have been particularly effective at emphasizing that imperfection is a universal human experience rather than a personal failing.

The stakes are far from trivial. Previous research has linked heavy photo-investment — the constant choosing, editing, and worrying over self-portraits — to body dissatisfaction, appearance anxiety, self-objectification, and even elevated risk for eating disorders. On visually oriented platforms, comparisons are overwhelmingly upward: users measure themselves against curated, filtered, and algorithmically amplified ideals that are essentially unattainable. This feeds a cycle of body surveillance and shame in which women evaluate themselves from an imagined observer’s perspective rather than from their own lived experience. An intervention that interrupts this cycle, even modestly, could therefore have public-health relevance well beyond aesthetics.

Adherence and user experience data added encouraging context. Most participants completed the weekly meditations — 89.3 percent in week one, 78.6 percent in week two, and 82.1 percent in week three — and the vast majority finished the written exercises, whether on paper or mentally. Feedback questionnaires showed that 68 percent of women rated the program as extremely or very pleasant and equally interesting, while 64 percent judged it extremely or very useful. Ease of implementation scored lowest, with 40 percent of participants reporting some difficulty integrating the practices into daily routines, suggesting that concepts like affectionate breathing and supportive touch may require more structured guidance, demonstrations, and step-by-step support to feel intuitive.

The authors are careful to frame the findings as preliminary. The sample was small and consisted exclusively of young Italian women, limiting generalizability to men, adolescents, and other cultural contexts — even though men increasingly face unrealistic beauty ideals online as well. The control group was passive rather than active, so the researchers cannot rule out that any structured online activity might have produced similar benefits; prior work shows self-esteem training and media literacy programs can also reduce maladaptive photo behaviors. The study was not preregistered, and the effect sizes, while statistically robust, were moderate. There is also the question of durability: without regular reinforcement through practice and reflection, the gains may fade, a pattern seen in earlier self-compassion trials.

Perhaps the most intriguing limitation concerns the intervention’s content itself. The meditations and exercises were designed to build general self-compassion, not to target body image specifically. Yet other studies suggest that body-focused practices — body gratitude journaling, self-compassionate mirror exposure, and the emerging construct of body compassion, which extends self-compassion principles directly to one’s physical self — may be even more effective at improving body satisfaction. The Italian team proposes that future versions of the program incorporate scripts aimed squarely at body concerns, and that the approach be tested earlier in development, during adolescence or even preadolescence, when intensive social media exposure first begins to threaten the formation of a healthy body image.

Even with those caveats, the study’s core message is striking in its accessibility. A brief, entirely online program requiring roughly one meditation and one exercise per week — no therapist, no clinic, no cost — shifted how young women related to the photographs they share with the world. In an era when appearance pressure has been industrialized by platforms engineered for visual comparison, teaching women to treat themselves with the same kindness they would offer a friend may be one of the most scalable defenses available. The researchers’ next challenge is to determine whether these early gains can be sustained, deepened, and extended to the far broader population whose self-worth is currently measured one filtered photo at a time.

Subject of Research: Effects of a brief online self-compassion intervention on photo-investment and body image in young adult women

Article Title: Mitigating Photo-Investment in Young Adult Women Through an Online Self-Compassion Intervention: A Controlled Study

Article References: Villani, D., Bologni, A., Cuccì, G., & Di Natale, A. F. (2026). Mitigating Photo-Investment in Young Adult Women Through an Online Self-Compassion Intervention: A Controlled Study. Mindfulness. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12671-026-03000-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s12671-026-03000-8

Keywords: self-compassion, photo-investment, social media, body image, Instagram, young women, mindfulness, self-kindness, common humanity, online intervention, body dissatisfaction, selfies

The study’s participants completed a battery of self-report questionnaires, including validated measures of body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, and the internalization of sociocultural appearance ideals, alongside a purpose-built questionnaire assessing how they actually used Instagram. The researchers deliberately went beyond the crude metric of minutes per day. They asked about the content participants consumed, the activities they engaged in, and the social feedback they received, on the premise that an hour spent scrolling fitspiration accounts is not psychologically equivalent to an hour spent watching cooking videos or messaging friends.

What they found paints a vivid statistical portrait of a generation living inside an appearance-saturated visual economy. One in four participants reported spending three or more hours per day on Instagram. More than half — 55.1 percent — admitted to editing their photos before posting them, digitally reshaping their faces and bodies to fit an idealized template. Nearly 40 percent reported that receiving many likes on a post made them feel better about their appearance, a striking illustration of how quantified social approval has become entangled with self-worth. And 53.8 percent said they followed fitspiration content, the genre of fitness-themed imagery that research has repeatedly shown promotes a ‘strong is the new skinny’ ideal while functioning much like thin-ideal media in its effects on viewers.

These specific behaviors mattered. The researchers found that photo editing, sensitivity to likes, and following fitspiration accounts were each associated with some or all of the body-image variables they measured, including greater appearance-ideal internalization, more frequent appearance comparisons, higher body dissatisfaction, and more disordered eating symptoms. In other words, it is not simply being on Instagram that correlates with body image concerns; it is what users do there and what they expose themselves to. A user who edits her selfies, tracks her likes, and fills her feed with sculpted fitness bodies is participating in a feedback loop in which she both consumes and produces idealized imagery, continuously reinforcing the standards she is measured against.

The most consequential finding, however, concerned perceived appearance pressure. The majority of participants reported feeling pressure from Instagram to conform to appearance standards — a subjective sense that the platform demands a certain kind of body, face, and presentation. This perceived pressure was significantly related to higher levels of appearance-ideal internalization, meaning participants had absorbed those standards as their own personal ideals; to more frequent appearance comparisons, the mental habit of measuring one’s own body against the bodies on screen; to greater body dissatisfaction; and to more disordered eating. The researchers’ theoretical model, the Tripartite Influence Model, originally developed to explain how peers, family, and traditional media shape body image, proved remarkably adaptable to the social media era.

Crucially, the statistical analysis showed that both appearance-ideal internalization and appearance comparison significantly mediated the relationship between perceived appearance pressure on Instagram and body dissatisfaction. In plain terms, the pressure itself does not act directly; it works through two intermediate psychological steps. First, women internalize the ideals they perceive — the thin, toned, edited aesthetic becomes their personal benchmark. Second, they engage in habitual comparison, holding their real bodies up against that benchmark and, inevitably, finding themselves wanting. This dual-pathway structure is scientifically important because it identifies specific, testable targets for intervention. If internalization and comparison are the conduits of harm, then programs that disrupt those conduits — media literacy training, for example, which has a documented evidence base in reducing body dissatisfaction — could plausibly blunt Instagram’s impact even in a world where the platform remains ubiquitous.

The findings arrive amid a growing international body of research linking image-based social media to body image disturbance and disordered eating. Systematic reviews and meta-analyses have consistently reported positive associations between social networking site use and body image concerns in young women, and experimental work has shown that brief exposure to idealized Instagram imagery can measurably worsen women’s mood and body satisfaction compared with control images. Studies have also documented that photo-based activities — posting selfies, investing in feedback on those selfies, editing images — are more strongly tied to body surveillance and dissatisfaction than passive text-based use. The Portuguese study adds granularity to this literature by dissecting the platform’s effects into content, activity, and perceived pressure, rather than treating Instagram as a monolithic exposure.

The study also carries implications for how the fitspiration phenomenon should be understood. Marketed as health motivation, fitspiration content has been shown in content analyses to objectify and sexualize women’s bodies, present narrowly defined and largely unattainable physiques, and frequently pair imagery with diet and exercise messaging that shades into disordered eating territory. That more than half of the surveyed students followed such accounts suggests how thoroughly this genre has been normalized. The fact that following fitspiration content was associated with body-image variables in this sample reinforces the argument, advanced by several research groups, that ‘wellness’ aesthetics can function as thin-ideal media in a new visual dialect — one that borrows the language of health to legitimize appearance scrutiny.

There are, of course, limits to what a cross-sectional, self-report study can establish. The design cannot prove that Instagram pressure causes body dissatisfaction; it is possible that women who already feel worse about their bodies seek out more appearance-focused content and perceive more pressure. Self-report measures are also vulnerable to recall and social desirability biases, and the sample — female college students at a Portuguese university — may not generalize to men, to adolescents, or to users in other cultural contexts. The researchers note that the data cannot be shared publicly for privacy and ethical reasons, and that participants consented to their data being used only for this study. Still, the consistency of the present findings with experimental and longitudinal work elsewhere strengthens the case that the observed pathways reflect a genuine risk mechanism rather than a statistical artifact.

The authors argue that their results carry weight for research, intervention, educational programs, and policy alike. For clinicians, the identification of internalization and comparison as mediators supports assessment and treatment approaches that directly target these processes, which are already central to cognitive-behavioral and media-literacy-based prevention programs. For educators, the high prevalence of photo editing and like-sensitivity among young women suggests that digital literacy curricula should address not just what students see online but how they curate and perform their own images. And for policymakers, the study adds to the accumulating evidence base behind regulatory efforts to scrutinize how platform design — infinite appearance-focused feeds, quantified approval metrics, and algorithmic amplification of idealized bodies — may contribute to harm among young users. As Instagram and its visual kin become ever more deeply woven into daily life, the study’s central message is difficult to ignore: the danger lies not in the app itself, but in the pressure it transmits and the psychological machinery through which that pressure becomes self-criticism.

Subject of Research: The relationship between Instagram use, perceived appearance pressure, and body image outcomes in female college students

Article Title: Instagram Use and Body Image Variables in Female College Students

Article References: Coelho, C., Fontes, C., Ramos, R., Rodrigues, T., Machado, P. P., & Gonçalves, S. (2025). Instagram Use and Body Image Variables in Female College Students. Trends in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s43076-025-00501-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s43076-025-00501-8

Keywords: Instagram, body image, body dissatisfaction, disordered eating, appearance pressure, appearance comparison, appearance-ideal internalization, fitspiration, photo editing, social media, female college students, Tripartite Influence Model

The research team, led by Jessica Visone, a second-year medical student at Rutgers New Jersey Medical School, with contributions from Kathryn Whitehill, MD, and medical students Shivani Srivastava and Katherine Poole, conducted a cross-sectional audit of 65 public Instagram accounts between September 22 and November 15, 2025. The sample was deliberately constructed to capture the organizations families trust most: the top children’s hospitals for pediatric and adolescent behavioral health, professional medical societies, and the state health departments serving the largest pediatric populations in the country. The starting date was not arbitrary. On September 22, 2025, the White House issued messaging linking prenatal acetaminophen use to autism, a claim made despite the absence of causal evidence, and the resulting controversy spread rapidly across platforms. The researchers used the American Academy of Pediatrics as a benchmark, measuring time to first relevant post, the proportion of controversy-related content, and the quality of that content.

The headline finding was stark. Only 14 of the 65 institutions, or 21.5 percent, posted any content addressing the controversy or correcting the false claims about acetaminophen and autism. The American Academy of Pediatrics was the clear outlier in responsiveness: it posted on Day 1 of the study window and published 10 relevant posts across the period. At the other end of the spectrum, none of the state health departments posted any relevant content at all, and children’s hospitals that did respond lagged as long as 51 days behind the AAP’s first post. In practical terms, that means a family scrolling Instagram in late September could have encountered viral claims connecting a common fever and pain medication to autism, with no corrective message from their state health authority or their children’s hospital for weeks, if ever.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of the audit is what it says about why the silence occurred. The researchers found that non-responding institutions were not inactive. Some of the organizations that never addressed the acetaminophen controversy published more than 100 posts on unrelated topics during the same study period. That detail, the authors argue, suggests the institutional silence reflected an administrative choice rather than a limitation of capacity or staffing. The infrastructure to communicate existed and was actively being used; it simply was not activated in response to a public health misinformation crisis. Visone framed the finding as a matter of institutional responsibility, noting that major health organizations have a duty to communicate with the populations they serve during times of increased health misinformation, and that at such moments there is nothing more powerful than the truth when it comes to population health.

The quality analysis added a second layer of concern. Among the 26 relevant posts that were published across all institutions, 85 percent used plain-language formatting and myth-busting framing, techniques that communication researchers generally consider best practice for countering misinformation. Myth-busting framing typically involves explicitly naming the false claim, warning readers that it is false, and then substituting the correct information, an approach designed to avoid reinforcing the misconception. Yet even the posts that followed these conventions fell short on accessibility. The average reading level of the relevant posts, measured using the Flesch-Kincaid grade level formula, was grade 11.4, well above the average 8th-grade reading level of adults in the United States. The researchers also assessed readability using the SMOG index, alongside checks for multilingual availability and accessibility features.

That reading-level gap matters because readability formulas estimate the years of education needed to comprehend a text. Content written at an 11th-grade level is effectively inaccessible to a substantial share of the adult population, including many of the pregnant patients and parents of young children most directly targeted by the acetaminophen claims. Compounding the problem, the audit identified no multilingual content across any of the institutions studied, meaning Spanish-speaking families and other non-English speakers had no institutionally produced corrective content in their own languages. For a misinformation event that specifically concerned decisions made during pregnancy, the absence of accessible, translated guidance represents a significant equity gap in the digital public health response.

The study’s methodology reflects a growing effort to bring quantitative rigor to the evaluation of health communication. All analyses were conducted in R version 4.5.3, and the team coded posts for format, content framing, emotional tone, and accessibility features. One of the study’s figures visualizes the timeline of institutional responses as horizontal bars measuring the number of days from September 22, 2025, to each institution’s first relevant Instagram post, with point sizes indicating the total number of relevant posts each institution published. State health departments are absent from that figure entirely, because they had no posts to depict. A second figure breaks down the prevalence of content quality and accessibility features across the 26 relevant posts, grouped by format, framing, tone, and accessibility, providing a template other researchers could apply to future controversies.

The authors argue that the findings point to a gap in administrative infrastructure and policy, not merely in content creation. Their proposed remedy is concrete: pediatric health systems should develop standardized rapid-response protocols that include pre-approved messaging templates written at or below an 8th-grade reading level, multilingual versions of those templates, and clear internal processes for activating effective and accessible communication when emerging controversies arise. The AAP’s Day 1 response demonstrates, the researchers contend, that rapid, high-quality digital communication is achievable even during a fast-moving health controversy. The problem is not that the standard is unreachable; it is that most organizations in the sample never attempted to meet it, leaving families without institutional guidance during an active misinformation event.

The broader significance of the audit extends beyond the acetaminophen controversy itself. As social media grows in popularity as a source of medical information, the pathways by which families encounter health claims have fundamentally changed, and institutional communication strategies have not kept pace. A misinformation event can now reach millions of users within hours, while the audit shows institutional responses arriving on a timescale of weeks or months, if at all. Visone is scheduled to present the abstract during the Oct. 2-6 conference in San Diego, with a poster presentation for the Section on Administration and Practice Management and a featured appearance at a press Soundbite Session. The study offers a practical framework for evaluating and strengthening institutional communication capacity, and its central lesson is likely to resonate with health communicators well beyond pediatrics: in the modern information environment, the speed, readability, and language accessibility of official responses are not secondary concerns but core determinants of whether accurate health information reaches the public at all.

Subject of Research: Institutional responsiveness of pediatric health organizations to acetaminophen-autism misinformation on Instagram

Article Title: Social media analysis finds health institutions delayed or did not respond to false claims inking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy

Article References: Social media analysis finds health institutions delayed or did not respond to false claims inking autism to acetaminophen use during pregnancy. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: acetaminophen, autism, health misinformation, social media, Instagram, pediatrics, American Academy of Pediatrics, health communication, children's hospitals, state health departments, readability, public health

That Instagram post is one of 194 pieces of content analysed in a new study published in the Journal of Science Communication (JCOM), which examined the social media activity of three women astronauts and science influencers: Kellie Gerardi, Shawna Pandya and Norah Patten. The research was conducted by Karen Shalev and Shannon Pappas, both graduate students, and Jocelyn Steinke, professor of communication at the University of Connecticut. Its central conclusion is deceptively simple but consequential for anyone who thinks about how science reaches the public in the digital era. Science communication on social media, the authors find, involves far more than explaining facts and concepts. Personal experiences, the communicator’s own identity and the platform-specific tools of Instagram, from music and hashtags to humour and references to popular culture, all contribute to shaping the message that audiences ultimately receive.

According to Steinke, the strategic dimension of this work is what sets the study apart. The three science influencers, she explains, framed their messages on Instagram deliberately, not only to communicate scientific information and foster public interest and engagement in STEMM, the collective abbreviation for science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine, but also to build their own personal brands and expand their audiences on the platform. In an environment where attention is the scarcest resource, the study suggests, effective science communication looks less like a lecture and more like a carefully composed narrative in which the scientist is also a character, the laboratory is also a stage, and the audience is invited to follow a person rather than merely absorb a topic.

The material the researchers examined was bounded in time and circumstance. They analysed posts published on the three influencers’ Instagram accounts between 24 June and 24 November 2024, a window that opened after the announcement of an upcoming Virgin Galactic research mission featuring Gerardi, Pandya and Patten as an all-women, international crew. That announcement gave the study a natural focal point: three women preparing, individually and collectively, for spaceflight, and documenting the process in public. The researchers did not sample selectively. They analysed all components of the posts, including photographs, videos, written text, audio, hashtags and emojis, treating each element as part of the communicative act rather than as decoration around a written core.

Methodologically, the study asked three questions about each message: what topics the influencers selected, how they framed those topics, and which communication tactics they used to attract attention. In the language of framing theory, the researchers considered what the influencers encouraged audiences to think about, how they guided audiences to interpret those subjects, and where they directed the audience’s attention. The analysis identified six broad topics, seven message frames and five types of communication tactics across the corpus of 194 posts, a structure that allowed the team to map how the same platform can carry both technical content and intimate autobiography without one undermining the other.

The topics themselves ranged from the rigorously scientific to the deeply personal. Some posts focused on the women’s research and training, explained scientific phenomena and showed experiments conducted in microgravity. Others traced the personal journeys that had led each of them into STEMM, naming the people who had encouraged them, the challenges they had faced and the textures of their everyday lives. Gerardi, for example, has spoken publicly about motherhood, infertility and her experiences with in vitro fertilisation. Patten shared photographs from her first visit to the Kennedy Space Center with her father and brother when she was fifteen. Pandya recalled the experiences and mentors who contributed to her path to becoming an astronaut. These posts allow audiences to see not only the scientific work but the people carrying it out, along with the rarely linear routes that brought them there.

Steinke argues that this blend of expertise and intimacy is precisely the point. There is, she says, a strategic attempt not only to share knowledge about STEMM and STEMM careers but to provide an insider perspective and to connect with audiences more personally, fostering authenticity, connection and engagement with broad and diverse audiences. By sharing their experiences, the influencers can serve as influential role models for future generations and inspire girls to consider the possibility of becoming astronauts themselves. The claim matters because representation research has long suggested that visible, relatable exemplars shape who imagines themselves belonging in scientific fields. An astronaut who is also a mother, a daughter, a patient navigating fertility treatment or a person with a favourite pop star is a harder stereotype to dismiss than the austere figure of conventional imagination.

The tactics the women deploy are thoroughly native to Instagram. The posts adopt the forms and conventions of the platform: short videos, photo carousels, text overlaid on images, hashtags, emojis, trending music and references to popular culture. Taylor Swift, David Bowie and Charli xcx all feature in some of the posts. Gerardi jokingly refers to herself as a bratstronaut, a wink at a pop-cultural moment, while footage of parabolic flights is accompanied by songs about space or weightlessness. The women also use humour, wordplay and immediately recognisable visual elements, including flight suits, models, clothing decorated with stars and planets, and footage recorded during training. According to the authors, these elements are more than decorative additions. They help adapt the content to the platform, attract attention and connect science with forms of expression that are already familiar to Instagram users, lowering the barrier between specialist knowledge and everyday scrolling.

The personal dimension of the content also does quiet ideological work. In their posts, the three women present themselves simultaneously as astronauts, researchers, doctors, mothers, daughters and women interested in fashion or music. By making these multiple identities visible at once, they demonstrate that there is no single way to look or behave in order to be credible in STEMM. The pink flight jacket that opened this story is emblematic: a garment that signals belonging to the tradition of test pilots and spacefarers, rendered in a colour that tradition has historically excluded. The study’s framing analysis suggests that such choices are communicative acts, guiding audiences toward an interpretation of science and scientists that is broader and more inclusive than the one most people inherit.

The authors are careful about the limits of what they can claim. This is a qualitative analysis of messages shared by three highly visible STEMM figures on a single platform and over a limited period. The study did not establish whether every communication choice was consciously planned by the women, nor whether they manage their accounts with professional assistance. It also did not examine how audiences interpreted the posts or which content attracted the most attention and engagement, questions that future research should address. Even so, the scale of the potential reach is hard to ignore. At the time the study was conducted, the three influencers had a combined following of more than 1.5 million Instagram users, a figure that dwarfs the audience of most traditional science outreach. The findings, the authors suggest, offer useful insights for the training of scientists and science communicators, because communicating strategically means considering not only what information to convey but how to present it, which parts of one’s experience to share, and how to adapt a message to the context in which audiences will encounter it. Women in STEMM, Steinke concludes, are using social media to gain visibility and voice, to advance their goals as science communicators, to change perspectives on the role and contributions of women in the field, and to inspire younger generations to consider STEMM careers as a future option. One post at a time, the frame is being rewritten.

Subject of Research: Strategic science communication practices of women astronaut science influencers on Instagram

Article Title: "Mom says a pink flight jacket is ok"

Article References: "Mom says a pink flight jacket is ok". (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: science communication, Instagram, women in STEMM, astronauts, social media, framing, Kellie Gerardi, Shawna Pandya, Norah Patten, role models, JCOM, University of Connecticut

Emily Pfender, an assistant professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Delaware and a researcher on the study, explained the central concern driving the work. Traditional scholarship on the Theory of Memorable Messages holds that people recall lifelong guidance from trusted individuals within their own networks, such as relatives, mentors, or physicians. Yet when her team asked young adults about the health messages they remembered most, participants pointed overwhelmingly to social media figures. Strikingly, many respondents did not even follow the influencer in question. They stumbled across the content a single time, perhaps scrolling through a recommended feed, and the message stuck. Some participants reported recalling these one-time encounters for six years or longer, and the literature on memorable messages suggests such memories can persist for a lifetime.

The mechanics of why a fleeting encounter with a stranger can outlast repeated advice from a trusted clinician is one of the most technically interesting questions raised by the research. Memorable messages, as defined in communication science, are verbal and nonverbal messages that are recalled with unusual clarity and are perceived to have shaped a person’s attitudes, beliefs, or behaviors over the long term. They tend to be emotionally charged, framed in vivid and concrete language, and delivered at moments of receptivity. Social media platforms, particularly short-form video environments, are engineered to maximize precisely these qualities. Influencers craft punchy, absolute claims; the platforms optimize for content that triggers strong reactions; and the sheer volume of exposure increases the odds that at least one message will breach the threshold of long-term memory.

The findings cut in two directions at once, and Pfender was explicit about that duality. On the one hand, many of the memorable health messages recalled by participants were problematic in ways that experts would flag immediately. Some promoted sweeping universal prescriptions with little or no scientific basis: taping one’s mouth shut at night to reshape the jaw, drinking two cups of spearmint tea per day to manage polycystic ovary syndrome, or avoiding seed oils as a catch-all dietary cure. On the other hand, some of the recalled messages were genuinely empowering, encouraging young people to view health holistically, to treat mental health as an integral component of overall well-being, and to take an active, autonomous role in their own care. The same channel that spreads dubious pseudoscience also spreads framing that can genuinely improve how people think about their bodies.

The alarm in the research centers less on any single claim than on the structural change it reveals. When a person’s most memorable health message comes from a stranger, that stranger may well have a financial stake in whether the audience follows the recommendation. An influencer selling mouth tape, supplements, or dietary programs profits directly when a memorable message converts into a purchase. This differs fundamentally from the traditional model of memorable messages, in which the trusted source, a grandmother, a coach, a family physician, typically had no commercial interest in the advice being remembered. Pfender described this shift as changing everything researchers thought they knew about how memorable messages work, and the word she used to characterize it was alarming.

For public health communication, the implications are considerable. Health agencies and clinicians have long operated on the assumption that their authoritative position in the information ecosystem gives their messages durability. If young adults are demonstrably anchoring their long-term health beliefs to one-time encounters with monetized strangers, then the durable-message slot in memory is being filled by actors with no accountability and no obligation to accuracy. A memorable but false message, such as the idea that a simple daily habit can structurally alter one’s facial development, is not merely a harmless quirk of memory. It can steer health decisions, delay legitimate care, and establish a template for evaluating future advice that privileges confidence and relatability over evidence.

The study also illuminates a subtle vulnerability of the one-encounter model of influence. Traditional memorable-message theory emphasized repeated reinforcement within close relationships, which meant that questionable claims could be corrected or contextualized by other network members over time. A message from a stranger encountered once in a feed arrives with no surrounding relationship, no possibility of follow-up, and no community context in which it can be questioned. The receiver is left alone with the claim and its emotional charge. In that sense, the very features that make algorithmic distribution efficient, the endless novelty, the frictionless discovery of new voices, may also strip away the social scaffolding that historically helped people calibrate which advice to trust.

Pfender and her collaborators argue that the appropriate response is not to lament the new media environment but to meet it where it operates. She identified digital health literacy interventions as the crucial next step, including dedicated social media platforms and accounts designed to teach young audiences how to evaluate health claims online. Critically, she argued that these interventions should take the form of short-form content and be posted natively on the same platforms where the problematic messages circulate, particularly TikTok and Instagram. A digital health literacy campaign delivered through a static brochure or a university website would be competing in a different arena entirely; the point is to give audiences memorable counter-messages in the same format, style, and channel that made the original claims memorable in the first place.

Pfender practices what she describes. As a content creator herself, she actively shares her research findings on social media, where she has built a following of more than 34,000 people. Her call, in her own framing, is simple: the scientific community needs more scientists online. The reasoning is practical rather than rhetorical. If the slot for memorable health messages is now filled by whoever earns the algorithm’s recommendation, then evidence-based voices that refuse to participate in short-form video are effectively conceding that slot to whoever shows up. Engagement, clarity, and repetition, the same qualities that make misinformation sticky, are available to accurate communicators as well, but only if they enter the environment.

The broader lesson of the study may be that memory itself has become contested territory. For most of the twentieth century, the messages people remembered about their health were filtered through relationships, institutions, and professional gatekeepers, however imperfectly. Those filters have not disappeared, but they no longer monopolize the channel. A young adult’s most durable health belief can now originate with an anonymous account encountered once, monetized behind the scenes, and optimized by recommendation systems that know nothing about medical accuracy. Understanding that shift, measuring it, and learning to compete within it is, on the evidence of this research, one of the central communication challenges for public health in the coming decade. The study was published in Health Communication on August 13, 2026.

Subject of Research: Memorable health messages received by young adults on social media

Article Title: For young adults, memorable health advice is increasingly coming from strangers online

Article References: For young adults, memorable health advice is increasingly coming from strangers online. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: memorable messages, health communication, social media, influencers, young adults, digital health literacy, misinformation, TikTok, Instagram, University of Delaware, public health, young

The research team, led by Neda Naqdi Babaee and Saeedeh Shamsaee of Mazandaran University of Science and Technology together with Mohammad Ali Shams of Babol University of Medical Sciences, adopted a qualitative design centered on the perspectives of the audience itself. Rather than analyzing advertisements from a purely rhetorical distance, the researchers asked the people who actually watch these clips what makes them work. Forty Iranian English teachers were purposively selected for semi-structured interviews, a sampling strategy that ensured participants had direct professional familiarity with both language teaching and the social media ecosystem in which teacherpreneurs operate. Each participant viewed and discussed ten highly viewed Instagram clips produced by prominent entrepreneurial teachers, providing a shared reference point that grounded the conversations in concrete, comparable material.

The technical backbone of the analysis was MAXQDA, version 2022, a widely used software package for qualitative data analysis. Interview transcripts were systematically coded, allowing the researchers to identify recurring patterns across forty distinct sets of perceptions and to move from individual impressions toward robust thematic categories. This kind of computer-assisted thematic coding is increasingly standard in applied linguistics and educational research because it imposes discipline on what can otherwise be a subjective interpretive process. By tagging segments of speech and clustering them into themes, the team could trace how often particular persuasive features were mentioned, in what contexts, and with what evaluative weight, producing a structured map of audience judgment rather than a loose collection of anecdotes.

Three factors emerged with particular force. Speaker credibility, emotional appeals, and varied sentence structures were identified as the elements that most significantly influenced the success of the advertisements. Credibility, in this context, was not simply a matter of credentials displayed in a bio. Teachers in the study judged teacherpreneurs by the confidence and professionalism of their delivery, the coherence of their message, and the sense that the person on screen genuinely knew the craft of language teaching. Emotional appeals operated alongside this expertise, with successful clips tapping into learners’ anxieties, aspirations, and desire for progress. Varied sentence structures, meanwhile, kept the delivery dynamic and engaging, preventing the monotony that quickly loses viewers in a fast-paced visual medium.

Underlying these surface features, the thematic analysis identified five main themes that organize how audiences make sense of teacherpreneur advertising: audience engagement strategies, the link between marketing and education, authenticity and effective communication, teacher credibility in the eyes of the audience, and educational effectiveness. The first theme captured the tactics teacherpreneurs use to hook and hold attention, from direct address to relatable classroom scenarios. The second highlighted a tension and a synergy: the best advertisements were seen not as pure sales pitches but as hybrid artifacts in which a genuine teaching moment doubles as a demonstration of the seller’s competence. When a short clip actually teaches something useful, it simultaneously advertises the teacher’s ability to teach, collapsing the traditional boundary between content marketing and instruction.

Authenticity proved to be perhaps the most delicate ingredient. Participants repeatedly emphasized that effective communication depended on an authentic, believable presentation, and that audiences appear remarkably sensitive to performances that feel staged or exaggerated. Clarity of message delivery was repeatedly named as a key factor affecting engagement, alongside the presenter’s credibility and the believability of the overall performance. This finding resonates with broader research on parasocial trust in influencer marketing, but it carries a distinctive educational twist. A language teacher who exaggerates results or oversells a method risks not only a lost sale but damage to the professional trust on which all teaching depends. The teachers in the study appeared to reward restraint and transparency as much as charisma.

The fifth theme, educational effectiveness, connects the study to larger debates about the commercialization of language education. Teacherpreneurship, in which educators build businesses around their personal brands, has grown explosively on platforms like Instagram, particularly in contexts such as Iran where private English education is a major industry and social media offers a direct channel to prospective students. The study suggests that this commercial ecosystem is not inherently at odds with pedagogical quality. On the contrary, the perceptions gathered here indicate that audiences evaluate teacherpreneur advertisements through an educational lens, asking whether the person behind the advertisement can actually deliver the learning outcomes being promised. Marketing that demonstrates real teaching skill earns approval; marketing that substitutes hype for substance invites skepticism.

The methodological choices of the study deserve attention for what they reveal about how such questions can be investigated. Purposive sampling of forty teachers ensured that every participant was positioned to comment meaningfully on both the linguistic and commercial dimensions of the clips. Semi-structured interviews allowed the researchers to follow unexpected lines of thought while still covering a consistent set of prompts across participants, and the use of ten shared stimulus clips reduced the variability that plagues studies of social media content. The thematic coding in MAXQDA 2022 then transformed a large volume of conversational data into five coherent themes, a pipeline that other researchers studying educational influencers on TikTok, YouTube, or other platforms could readily adapt. The study was approved by the Mazandaran University of Science and Technology Ethics Committee, with informed consent obtained from all participants, and the authors report no competing interests and no external funding.

For teacherpreneurs themselves, the practical implications are direct. Credibility must be built and signaled, not merely claimed. Emotional connection matters, but it works best when anchored to genuine pedagogical substance. Delivery should be varied and clear, avoiding both monotony and theatrical excess. And authenticity, that most overused of marketing buzzwords, emerges here as a measurable audience expectation: viewers judge whether the presentation is believable, and their willingness to engage follows from that judgment. For teacher educators and researchers, the study opens questions about how prospective teachers should be prepared for a professional landscape in which self-presentation and marketing literacy are increasingly part of the job. For platforms and regulators, it hints at the standards by which educational advertising is informally policed by audiences themselves.

The broader significance of the work lies in its reframing of social media advertising as a site of educational perception. The teachers who watched these Instagram clips were not passive consumers but active evaluators, applying professional criteria to commercial messages. Their collective verdict, distilled through qualitative analysis, is that persuasion in educational marketing rests on a tripod of credibility, emotion, and craft, with authenticity as the load-bearing joint between them. As language teaching continues its migration toward digital and hybrid formats, understanding how teachers and learners judge the people who sell it online will only grow in importance. This study provides an early, carefully documented map of that judgment, drawn directly from the professionals who know best what good teaching looks like, even when it arrives in a sixty-second clip between advertisements for everything else.

Subject of Research: EFL teachers' perceptions of teacherpreneurs' persuasive techniques in Instagram advertisements

Article Title: EFL teachers’ perceptions of teacherpreneurs’ persuasive techniques on Instagram

Article References: Naqdi Babaee, N., Shamsaee, S., & Shams, M. A. (2026). EFL teachers’ perceptions of teacherpreneurs’ persuasive techniques on Instagram. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00899-x

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00899-x

Keywords: teacherpreneurs, TEFL, Instagram, persuasive techniques, marketing, EFL teachers, credibility, emotional appeals, authenticity, social media advertising, qualitative research, thematic analysis

The study, led by Kung-Jeng Wang of the Department of Industrial Management together with Jia-Yu Liu of the Graduate Institute of Intelligent Manufacturing Technology, set out to build what the authors describe as an intelligent image design model. Its defining feature is a dual-objective mechanism. Rather than optimizing a single outcome, the system simultaneously evaluates two distinct dimensions of a food photograph: its visual attractiveness as perceived by audiences, and its nutritional content expressed in terms of calorie intake. This pairing is unusual in the image recommendation literature, which has traditionally treated engagement as the sole target. Here, the machine must learn to look at a plate of food and judge both whether people will like it and whether it appears healthful.

To train and validate the model, the researchers assembled a substantial empirical dataset: 6,331 Instagram images drawn from the brunch industry, complete with their associated metadata. Brunch is a particularly instructive domain for this kind of work. Its dishes span an enormous visual and nutritional range, from indulgent plates of pancakes and fried fare to lighter options built around fruit, vegetables, and lean proteins. That variety gives the algorithm a rich signal landscape from which to learn what visual features correlate with high engagement and which ones signal high or low caloric content. The dataset was made openly available on figshare, a decision that allows other researchers to scrutinize, reuse, and extend the work.

The technical pipeline begins with feature extraction. From each image, the system initially derives 311 candidate features, a number that reflects the sheer density of information a photograph can carry: color distributions, compositional attributes, object-level detections, and other measurable visual descriptors. Machine learning on raw high-dimensional data of this kind risks overfitting, so the researchers applied feature selection to distill the 311 candidates down to just 20 significant features. This reduction is more than a computational convenience. It produces an interpretable set of visual cues that the subsequent models actually rely on, which matters enormously when the goal is to hand human marketers concrete advice rather than opaque predictions.

With those 20 features in hand, the team constructed decision-tree models. Decision trees occupy a special place in machine learning because they do not merely classify; they explain. Each branch of a tree corresponds to a condition on a feature, and each path from root to leaf can be read as an if-then rule. In this study, that property is the engine of the whole approach. By growing trees that predict image appeal and trees that classify nutritional content, the researchers could extract actionable rules for image creation and modification, phrases such as the kinds of visual configurations that tend to raise engagement or shift perceived calorie content. The work draws on a mature body of decision-tree research, and it echoes a broader trend of tree-assisted intelligent frameworks being applied to food analysis problems in recent engineering literature.

The empirical results reported in the paper confirm that the model performs effectively on both of its objectives. The system successfully predicts how appealing an image will be to viewers and accurately classifies images on nutritional content, using the compact feature set as input. What elevates the contribution beyond prediction is the recommendation layer: because the underlying models are rule-based, the system does not simply score an image and move on. It generates specific, concrete suggestions for how an image could be created or altered to perform better on either or both goals. For a social media manager deciding how to shoot, style, or edit a photograph, that turns an abstract analytics problem into a practical checklist.

The dual-objective framing also reflects a real tension in contemporary food marketing. Public health researchers have long documented how social media food imagery shapes eating behavior, particularly among younger audiences, and studies have shown that color psychology and packaging cues strongly influence perceptions of healthiness and tastiness. At the same time, brands compete fiercely for attention in feeds saturated with hyper-styled, indulgent imagery. A system that optimizes only for engagement could, in principle, push content toward ever more decadent presentations. By building nutritional perception into the optimization target itself, the Taiwanese team has embedded a public-health-aware constraint directly into the content design process, which the authors position as a genuine integration of engagement metrics with nutritional considerations rather than an afterthought.

The practical implications extend well beyond brunch cafés. The authors argue that the model provides practitioners in the tourism, hospitality, and food sectors with a significant competitive advantage in optimizing visual design strategies. Restaurants and hotel brands increasingly live or die by their Instagram presence, and the cost of producing content is substantial. A tool that can pre-screen candidate photographs, flag weak points, and recommend specific modifications before anything is published could materially change the economics of social media content production. The rule-based output also makes the system auditable: marketers can see exactly why a recommendation is made, which builds trust in a way that black-box deep learning models of images generally do not.

Methodologically, the study positions itself within a lineage of computational aesthetics and social media analytics research, including prior work on predicting the appeal of marketing images, machine learning analyses of color and engagement in touristic Instagram pictures, and earlier image recommendation systems for other product industries. The choice of a rule-based, decision-tree approach over purely deep neural solutions is deliberate. It trades some raw representational power for transparency, and in a domain where the output is meant to guide human creative decisions, that trade appears to pay off. The framework also supports automated content generation pipelines, since the extracted rules can serve as design constraints for generative systems that produce or modify images automatically.

Published as volume 85, article number 770 in Multimedia Tools and Applications, the paper arrives at a moment when the boundary between content creation and algorithmic optimization is dissolving rapidly. Food photography was once judged by intuition and taste; increasingly, it is judged by models trained on thousands of examples of what audiences actually respond to. What distinguishes this work is its insistence that what audiences respond to should not be the only question worth asking. By teaching a machine to care simultaneously about whether a photograph draws the eye and whether it honestly represents the nutrition on the plate, the researchers have sketched a template for a more responsible kind of social media intelligence, one in which the algorithm that helps you go viral is also the algorithm that keeps you honest.

Subject of Research: A rule-based dual-objective machine learning model that recommends social media food images by jointly optimizing visual engagement and nutritional content perception.

Article Title: An intelligent image recommendation system for social media engagement and nutritional transparency: a rule-based dual-objective approach

Article References: Wang, K.-J., & Liu, J.-Y. (2026). An intelligent image recommendation system for social media engagement and nutritional transparency: a rule-based dual-objective approach. Multimedia Tools and Applications, 85(10), Article 770. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11042-026-21918-y

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s11042-026-21918-y

Keywords: social media, Instagram, image recommendation, decision trees, machine learning, nutritional transparency, calorie intake, engagement rate, food photography, dual-objective model, brunch industry, visual perception