Dolores Albarracin

University of Pennsylvania | UP

A meta-analysis of 150 research reports summarizing the results of multiple behavior domain interventions examined theoretical predictions about the effects of the included number of recommendations on behavioral and clinical change in the domains of smoking, diet, and physical activity. The meta-analysis yielded three main conclusions. First, ther...

Two experiments examined the influence of verb tense on how abstractly people construe action representations. Experiment 1 revealed that written descriptions of several daily events using the simple past tense (vs. simple present tense) resulted in actions and the action’s target being seen as less likely and less familiar, respectively. In Experi...

The current research examined whether nations differ in their attitudes toward action and inaction. It was anticipated that members of dialectical East Asian societies would show a positive association in their attitudes toward action/inaction. However, members of non-dialectical European-American societies were expected to show a negative associat...

Self-talk has fascinated scholars for decades but has received little systematic research attention. Three studies examined the conditions under which people talk to themselves as if they are another person, indicating a splitting or fragmentation of the self. Fragmented self-talk, defined by the use of the second person, You, and the imperative, w...

We hypothesized that individuals may differ in the dispositional tendency to have positive vs. negative attitudes, a trait termed the dispositional attitude. Across 4 studies, we developed a 16-item Dispositional Attitude Measure (DAM) and investigated its internal consistency, test-retest reliability, factor structure, convergent validity, discrim...

Public health data, such as HIV new diagnoses, are often left‐censored due to confidentiality issues. Standard analysis approaches that assume censored values as missing at random often lead to biased estimates and inferior predictions. Motivated by the Philadelphia areal counts of HIV new diagnosis for which all values less than or equal to 5 are...

To survive and prosper, researchers must demonstrate a successful record of publications in journals well-regarded by their fields. This chapter discusses how to successfully publish research in journals in the social and behavioral sciences and is organized into four sections. The first section highlights important factors that are routinely invol...

If conspiracy beliefs were an individual process, no conspiracy theory would be alike. Instead, these beliefs are promoted by individuals or social groups through the media or informal channels of communication, leading to identical beliefs being espoused by different people and social groups. This paper reviews the role of the social influence as...

Accomplishing the goals outlined in “Ending the HIV (Human Immunodeficiency Virus) Epidemic: A Plan for America Initiative” will require properly estimating and increasing access to HIV testing, treatment, and prevention services. In this research, a computational spatial method for estimating access was applied to measure distance to services from...

Objectives: To understand whether health insurance coverage of vaccine costs and discussing vaccination with a healthcare provider are necessary for trust in CDC (Centers for Disease Control) to increase the uptake of the vaccine. Method: A nationally representative sample of 2,549 adults from the United States answered questions about trust in...

The recent exchange about implicit attitudes is an acute reminder of the need to pay research attention to the correlation between implicit attitudes and overt behavior. Current implicit measures are excellent to detect evaluatively relevant associations arising from specific and variable internal states and predict judgments when people lack the m...

How do religious affiliation and beliefs shape vaccine attitudes and behaviors? This study examined the associations of attitudes and behaviors relevant to the flu, measles-mumps-rubella (MMR), and human-papillomavirus (HPV) vaccines with religious affiliations, as well as philosophical, spiritual, and moral beliefs. Respondents were 3,005 adults f...

To mitigate the opioid epidemic, a concerted effort to educate, prevent, diagnose, treat, and engage residents is required. In this study, a digitally distributed method to form a large network of organizations was tested with 99 counties in regions with high vulnerability to hepatitis C virus (HCV). The method involved a cascade of contacts going...

Fear appeals are designed to inspire intended and actual actions to avert a danger. Although prior meta-analyses report that the average effect of fear appeals is moderately positive, the role of efficacy information is not completely understood. Prior work and fear appeal theories have argued that the presence of both response and self-efficacy in...

Background Harm reduction interventions, including SSP (Syringe Services Programs) and MAT (Medications for Addiction Treatment) have demonstrated the potential to help stem the epidemic of opioid use disorder. However, for that potential to be realized, people must expect that healthcare providers will be supportive if they ever seek care for subs...

Conspiracy theories spread more widely and faster than ever before. Fear and uncertainty prompt people to believe false narratives of danger and hidden plots, but are not sufficient without considering the role and ideological bias of the media. This timely book focuses on making sense of how and why some people respond to their fear of a threat by...

In a survey and three experiments (one preregistered with a nationally representative sample), we examined if vaccination requirements are likely to backfire, as commonly feared. We investigated if relative to encouraging free choice in vaccination, requiring a vaccine weakens or strengthens vaccination intentions, both in general and among individ...

Background Although influenza vaccination can prevent influenza-related deaths, uptake remains low, particularly in disadvantaged populations. Purpose A theoretical model of psychological pathways to vaccination accounting for the direct and moderating role of socio-structural factors was tested. The study sought to understand the joint contributi...

Background: An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high...

Background: An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking, and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. Owing to the global scale and high...

At a time when pseudoscience threatens the survival of communities, understanding this vulnerability, and how to reduce it, is paramount. Four preregistered experiments (N = 532, N = 472, N = 605, N = 382) with online U.S. samples introduced false claims concerning a (fictional) virus created as a bioweapon, mirroring conspiracy theories about COVI...

Objective: The purpose of this meta-analysis was to examine the success of multiple-behavior interventions and to identify whether the efficacy of such programs depends on the number of recommendations prescribed and the type of outcomes measured. Method: We conducted a synthesis of 136 research reports (N = 59,330) using a robust variance estim...

This study investigated the association between interest in Pre-exposure Prophylaxis (PrEP) in the US using Google Health Trends as a source of big data and state policy variables of Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act (ACA) and initiation of PrEP Assistance Programs (PrEP-AP). As of December 2019, thirty-three states and the District...

BACKGROUND An infodemic is an overflow of information of varying quality that surges across digital and physical environments during an acute public health event. It leads to confusion, risk-taking and behaviors that can harm health and lead to erosion of trust in health authorities and public health responses. The global scale and high stakes of t...

Predicting human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) epidemiology is vital for achieving public health milestones. Incorporating spatial dependence when data varies by region can often provide better prediction results, at the cost of computational efficiency. However, with the growing number of covariates available that capture the data variability, the...

Behavior varies along a continuum of activity, with effortful behaviors characterizing actions and restful states characterizing inactions. Despite the adaptive value of both action and inaction, we propose three biases that, in the absence of other information, increase the probability that people like, and want to pursue, action more than inactio...

Objectives: Acceptance of pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) and testing for HIV is likely to vary as a function of the norms and communications within a geographic area. This study examined associations involving county tweets, in person communications, and HIV prevention and testing in regions with higher (vs. lower) estimated rates of men who have...

The stability of default effects to contextual features is critical to their use in policy. In this paper, decision time was investigated as a contextual factor that may pose limits on the efficacy of defaults. Consistent with the hypothesis that time constraints may increase reliance on contextual cues, four experiments, including a preregistered...

A fundamental challenge complicates news decisions about covering vaccine side effects: although serious vaccine side effects are rare, less severe ones do occur occasionally. The study was designed to test whether a side effect message could induce vaccine hesitancy and whether that could be countered by pro-vaccine messages about vaccine safety....

We conducted a preregistered, multi-laboratory project (k = 36; N = 3531) to assess the size and robustness of ego depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Laboratories implemented one of two procedures that intended to manipulate self-control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of...

This book explains how actions and inactions arise and change in social contexts, including social media and face-to-face communication. Its multidisciplinary perspective covers research from psychology, communication, public health, business studies, and environmental sciences. The reader can use this cutting-edge approach to design and interpret...

This book explains how actions and inactions arise and change in social contexts, including social media and face-to-face communication. Its multidisciplinary perspective covers research from psychology, communication, public health, business studies, and environmental sciences. The reader can use this cutting-edge approach to design and interpret...

Introduction Increased insurance coverage and access to health care can increase identification of undiagnosed HIV infection and use of HIV prevention services such as pre-exposure prophylaxis. This study investigates whether the Medicaid expansions facilitated by the Affordable Care Act had these effects. Methods A difference-in-differences desig...

Significance Vaccination yields the prosocial benefits of preventing the spread of infectious diseases and protecting communities from major disease outbreaks. This research examines how focusing on prosocial concerns motivates vaccination across environments with varying levels of social density. Contrary to the common intuition that prosocial con...

This book explains how actions and inactions arise and change in social contexts, including social media and face-to-face communication. Its multidisciplinary perspective covers research from psychology, communication, public health, business studies, and environmental sciences. The reader can use this cutting-edge approach to design and interpret...

Although humans are intuitive dualists, little is known about whether they hold lay beliefs about the origins or sources of their intuitive perceptions of what is physical and what is mental. Drawing on theories of the sources of phenomenological experiences, we examined if people hold beliefs about the internal and social origins of judments that...

Highlights  Incorporating data on daily Google searches, we investigated whether COVID-19 mitigation policies were associated with symptoms of depression and anxiety.  We found that mitigation policies were positively associated with the search indexes for mental health symptoms but do not suggest durable effects.  Moreover, the policies decreas...

Background Although rates of nonmedical opioid use are highest in late adolescence and emerging adulthood, efforts to understand the extent of the heterogeneity in opioid misuse during this time have been limited. The current study aimed to derive and define typologies of opioid use in high school students at the onset of emerging adulthood. Metho...

Background: Even though the terms "action" and "inaction" have been used to describe objects of attitudes, behaviors, and goals, the meaning of action and inaction for lay people has not been investigated. Method: In Study 1, participants were asked to spontaneously generate words and behaviors associated with action or inaction. In Studies 2 an...

We conducted a preregistered multi-laboratory project (k = 36; N = 3531) to assess the size and robustness of ego depletion effects using a novel replication method, termed the paradigmatic replication approach. Laboratories implemented one of two procedures that intended to manipulate self control and tested performance on a subsequent measure of...

Objectives. To determine whether holding vaccine misconceptions, in the form of negative beliefs about vaccines, correlates with opposing governmental action at all levels designed to increase vaccination (e.g., removing personal belief and religious vaccine exemptions). Methods. Drawing on data from a nationally representative survey of 1938 US ad...

Objective Using longitudinal methods to assess regional associations between social media posts about vaccines and attitudes and actual vaccination against influenza in the US. Methods Geolocated tweets from U.S. counties (N = 115,330) were analyzed using MALLET LDA (Latent Dirichlet allocation) topic modeling techniques to correlate with prospect...

Five experiments investigated a previously unrecognized phenomenon—remembering that one enacted a mundane behavioral decision when one only intended to do so—and its psychological mechanisms. The theoretical conceptualization advanced in this research proposes that this error stems from a misattribution when an intention and a behavior are similar....

Five experiments investigated a previously unrecognized phenomenon—remembering that one enacted a mundane behavioral decision when one only intended to do so—and its psychological mechanisms. The theoretical conceptualization advanced in this research proposes that this error stems from a misattribution when an intention and a behavior are similar....

Death and morbidity associated with substance use have risen continuously over the last few decades, increasing the need for rigorous examination of promising programs. Interventions attempting to change multiple behaviors have been designed to address interconnected problems such as use of both alcohol and drugs. This meta-analysis aimed to examin...

A US national probability-based survey during the early days of the SARS-CoV-2 spread in the US showed that, above and beyond respondents’ political party, mainstream broadcast media use (e.g., NBC News) correlated with accurate information about the disease's lethality, and mainstream print media use (e.g., the New York Times) correlated with accu...

Drug use reporting is often a bottleneck for modern public health surveillance; social media data provides a real-time signal which allows for tracking and monitoring opioid overdoses. In this work we focus on text-based feature construction for the prediction task of opioid overdose rates at the county level. More specifically, using a Twitter dat...

When deciding whether to vaccinate, people often seek information through consequential processes that are not currently well understood. A survey of a nationally representative sample of U.S. adults (N = 2,091) explored the factors associated with intentions to seek influenza vaccine information in the 2018-2019 influenza season. This survey shed...

An amendment to this paper has been published and can be accessed via a link at the top of the paper.

We present a consensus-based checklist to improve and document the transparency of research reports in social and behavioural research. An accompanying online application allows users to complete the form and generate a report that they can submit with their manuscript or post to a public repository.

With the rise of opioid abuse in the US, there has been a growth of overlapping hotspots for overdose-related and HIV-related deaths in Springfield, Boston, Fall River, New Bedford, and parts of Cape Cod. With a large part of population, including rural communities, active on social media, it is crucial that we leverage the predictive power of soci...

Human awareness of the passing of time leads to psychological processes designed to handle these inherent temporal limitations. Deadlines serve to energize desired courses of action and are likely to exert effects by leveraging general goals. Movement (e.g., walking, running) and stasis (e.g., standing, sitting), for example, may elicit general act...

Simple, self-posed questions may modulate behavioral repetition of choices in situations that are neither fully habitual nor fully intentional. In six experiments, participants were trained to repeatedly choose their preferred door out of an array of three doors. Questions generally increased speed in the upcoming task, supporting past findings tha...

This chapter presents a model of the cognitive, motivational, and behavioral implications of the concepts of action and inaction. The action or inaction nature of a behavior is a judgment, a subjective and variable construal, made by the actor or an observer based on concepts of action and inaction. In other literatures, action and inaction concept...

Today people reveal a substantial amount of personal information both online and offline. Although beneficial in many aspects, this exchange of personal information may pose privacy challenges if the information is disseminated outside the originally intended contexts. Through an online survey, this study investigates people’s online and offline in...

Objectives: Social media messages have been increasingly used in health campaigns about prevention, testing, and treatment of HIV. We identified factors leading to the retransmission of messages from expert social media accounts to create data-driven recommendations for online HIV messaging. Design and methods: We sampled 20,201 HIV-related twee...

The present study evaluated the potential use of Twitter data for providing risk indices of STIs. We developed Online Risk Indices (ORIs) based on tweets to predict new HIV, gonorrhea, and chlamydia diagnoses, across U.S. counties and across five years. We analyzed over one hundred million tweets from 2009 to 2013 using open-vocabulary techniques a...

Background: This study examined the influences of information sources on Zika-relevant knowledge and behaviors in US households containing members who are pregnant, intend to become pregnant, or have a higher probability of unintended pregnancy in Zika-affected regions (i.e. respondents who are younger, are black, have less education, are unmarrie...

This research aimed to determine the nature of social media discussions about HIV. With the goal of conducting a descriptive analysis, we collected almost 1,000 tweets posted February to September 2015. The sample of tweets included keywords related to HIV or behavioral risk factors (e.g., sex, drug use) and was coded for content (e.g., HIV), behav...

Four experiments uncovered an action dominance error by which people’s natural focus on actions hinders appropriate responses to social and nonsocial stimuli. This surprising error comprises higher rates of both omission (misses) and commission (false alarms) when, in responding to action and inaction demands, people have higher numbers of action t...