Heidi Vandebosch

University of Antwerp | UA · Department of Communication Studies

Background This study focuses on the Budd app, a mobile health intervention designed for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men who participate in chemsex. Chemsex, the use of psychoactive drugs in a sexual context, presents substantial health risks including increased HIV transmission and mental health issues. Addressing these risks re...

Most adolescents follow celebrity rumors daily. This study used a daily diary method to focus on adolescents’ (14–18 years old) regular engagement with celebrity content. Cognitive (attitudes of acceptability), affective (neutral feelings), and physiological (arousal) transitions in adolescents’ engagement were tracked and analyzed across a period...

Purpose This scoping review aims to explore how “food media”, “food messages” and “food content” are referred to in scholarly writing to enhance a shared understanding and comparability. Design/methodology/approach Following the PRISMA, ScR-guidelines, four scientific databases were screened on published manuscripts in academic journals, books and...

Experiencing online sexual harassment (OSH) poses significant threats to individuals' well-being, necessitating effective intervention. Addressing OSH requires collaboration across policy, education, and technology, where technology can play a role in supporting victims. This paper conducted a scoping review to identify technological tools for supp...

Online hate speech (OHS) is a prevalent issue on social media with harmful consequences for individuals and society. Counteracting this issue requires a better understanding of the factors that drive behaviors such as posting hate speech or making hateful comments. The present study contributes to this need by investigating the personal, social, an...

Digital disconnection has emerged as a concept describing the actions people take to limit their digital connectivity to enhance their well-being. To date, evidence on its effectiveness is mixed, leading to calls for greater consideration of why, how, when, and for whom digital disconnection works. This article responds to these calls, presenting a...

BACKGROUND This study focuses on the Budd app, a mobile health intervention designed for gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men who participate in chemsex. Chemsex, the use of psychoactive drugs in a sexual context, presents substantial health risks including increased HIV transmission and mental health issues. Addressing these risks re...

Purpose Explore what popular food influencers among Flemish emerging adults portray in their Instagram recipe posts in terms of (1) references to food literacy, (2) nutritional value, (3) rational and emotional appeals and (4) the relation between the nutritional value and rational/emotional appeals. Design/methodology/approach A content and nutri...

Background A well-studied internal barrier to regular physical activity, and more specifically brisk walking, is cognitive fatigue. However, thus far little research examined how cognitively fatigued individuals can be motivated to exercise, more specifically to engage in brisk walking. This study investigates whether humorous intervention messages...

Health has always been, and always will be, one of the most highly ranked priorities of people. Understanding how health and health behaviours are created, promoted, and maintained in the future under the influence of constant and changing media environments requires a younger generation of scholars in the field of health communication who are will...

Cyberbullying is a specific form of online aggression that has mainly been investigated amongst children, adolescents, and emerging adults. They can be involved in cyberbullying as a victim, perpetrator, and/or bystander. Cyberbullying research has made use of quantitative methods (such as cross-sectional and longitudinal surveys and experiments) a...

Communicating about new or unknown health risks is challenging because it requires audiences to engage with and process novel and often complex health information. This study examines how texts can convey awareness and increase knowledge about health risks people are unaware of. The focus is on how text genre (narrative, expository, and mixed-genre...

Meaningfulness in a digital game context originates from the introduction of the notion of eudaimonia through psychology (Huta & Waterman, 2014) and media entertainment research (Oliver & Bartsch, 2010). Eudaimonia stems from Aristotelian philosophy and describes that, to live a good life, individuals should focus on worthwhile aspects of life, exe...

Background The COVID-19 pandemic has revealed the fragility of the global food system, sending shockwaves across countries' societies and economy. This has presented formidable challenges to sustaining a healthy and resilient lifestyle. The objective of this study is to examine the food consumption patterns and assess diet diversity indicators, pri...

Despite the central role that teachers can have in preventing and reducing bullying, they often feel insecure about how to deal with bullying. This study evaluated a short teacher training – called the Teachers SUPporting POsitive RelaTionships (T-SUPPORT) training – that aims to reduce bullying by supporting teachers in building positive teacher-s...

Background: Reducing the spread of infectious diseases through vaccination faces the challenge of vaccine hesitancy: referring to questions, concerns and doubts arising when making a vaccine-related decision. A motivational state often arising within people exposed to health messages supporting informed decision making is psychological reactance,...

Eudaimonia (i.e., orienting toward or experiencing meaning, virtue, personal growth, and other worthwhile aspects of life) has recently received a great deal of academic interest in the field of media entertainment, especially for the medium of digital games. While a recent scoping review has improved the conceptual clarity on what constitutes euda...

Eudaimonia (i.e., orienting towards or experiencing meaning, virtue, personal growth, and other worthwhile aspects of life) has recently received a great deal of academic interest in the field of media entertainment, especially for the medium of digital games. While a recent scoping review has improved the conceptual clarity on what constitutes eud...

Chemsex refers to the intentional use of drugs before or during sex in a specific context, typically involving prolonged sex sessions with multiple partners. Engaging in chemsex is associated with a wide range of health risks and related risk behaviors. We developed a mobile phone application (‘Budd-app’) to support and inform chemsex participants,...

Online hate speech on social media platforms causes harm to those who are victimized as well as society at large. The prevalence of hateful content has, thus, prompted numerous calls for improved countermeasures and prevention. For such interventions to be effective, it is necessary to gain a nuanced understanding of influences that facilitate the...

Temporary and permanent disconnection from digital devices, platforms, or tools has gained traction from users and, subsequently, in academic discourse. A rapidly growing body of research focuses on so-called digital disconnection practices. However, the literature is highly scattered, with limited comprehensive work and consensus on essential foun...

This study aims to understand how and why emerging adults come into contact with food media messages, and what they perceive as positive and negative outcomes related to food literacy. Seven focus groups, stratified by gender and socio-economic status, with 37 emerging adults aged between 18 and 25 were conducted. Photovoice was used to reflect on...

Indoor radon is a natural radioactive gas and is one of the leading causes of lung cancer. Despite multiple policy and communication interventions to increase radon testing and mitigation, the uptake of these measures remains insufficient. A participatory research design was applied in Belgium and Slovenia to probe the barriers and facilitators hom...

Social media influencers (SMI) are increasingly becoming the target of online aggression. The first part of this study focuses on how this group of online users deals with online aggression and more specifically which coping strategies they use. In contrast to ordinary social media users, SMI experience online aggression situations on two levels: o...

Celebrities regularly become the victims of online bashing and criticism by the audience, a phenomenon known as celebrity bashing. Part of the reason why audience members are so aggressive toward famous people is that they consider this an acceptable and even entertaining behavior. However, there is limited knowledge on how these acceptable attitud...

The rise of online sexual harassment in recent years has spurred discussions both within the European Union and internationally. To effectively address this issue, it is imperative to foster collaboration among various sectors, including government entities, nongovernmental organizations, educational institutions, media outlets, and technology comp...

Online sexual harassment (OSH) can impact victims' mental health. When faced with OSH, some victims seek support on social media platforms like Reddit. The anonymity, "weak tie" networks, decentralized moderation, and free-speech discussion culture of Reddit afford victims of OSH a unique online environment to talk about their distressing experienc...

Indoor radon is a natural radioactive gas that enters homes through cracks in the foundations. It is one of the leading causes of lung cancer. Although radon can be detected with an indoor radon test and can be mitigated by means of either ventilation or professional measures, testing and mitigating rates of the at-risk population remain insufficie...

Background Chemsex refers to the intentional use of drugs before or during sex among men who have sex with men (MSM). Engaging in chemsex has been linked to significant negative impacts on physical, psychological, and social well-being. However, no evidence-based support tools have addressed either these harms or the care needs of MSM who engage in...

The past two decades have witnessed an increase in ethnicity-related peer aggression, driven by the intensification of the migration phenomenon and rise of information and communication technologies. The goal of the current study is to extend the scope of previous reviews on peer aggression to examine the emerging evidence on the role of technologi...

Serious digital games use the game's entertaining characteristics for a “serious” health learning, treatment, or behavior change purpose. Serious digital games have been used and shown to be effective in a variety of health settings (i.e., medical training, rehabilitation, mental health treatment, prevention and health promotion). Effects are, howe...

Cyberbullying is a form of online aggression that may have an important health impact, and thus needs to be addressed using evidence‐based interventions. Cyberbullying is most prevalent amongst young adolescents. They are in a developmental phase that is characterized by an increased importance of the peer group, high information and communication...

Drawing on theory from entertainment experiences and (narrative) persuasion research, this study investigates destigmatizing responses to a genre-hybrid (human-interest and stand-up comedy) nonfiction television program about minority groups. Using an online between-subjects experiment with 417 participants, we found that the combination of human-i...

Physical inactivity and sedentary behaviours are leading risk factors for preventable health problems worldwide. Therefore, several smartphone-based interventions have tried to enhance physical activity (PA) through goal reminders based on relatively stable characteristics. However, time-varying factors, such as cognitive fatigue, may act as barrie...

Empirical studies have persistently reported negative attitudes of meat eaters toward vegetarians and vegans (veg*ns), but scant attention has been paid to veg*ns' attitudes toward meat eaters. We aimed to investigate the attitudes of meat eaters and veg*ns from both perspectives. In addition, we explored the attitudes of occasional meat eaters. We...

Many people are fascinated by celebrities and like to follow them and leave positive comments online about the luxurious lives they lead. There are doubts and concerns, however, about whether celebrity posts regarding personal experiences and advice generate positive responses when their audience is in a situation of chronic stress, such as during...

The use of reflective interfaces has been proposed as a useful strategy to reduce cyber harassment amongst adolescents on social networking sites (SNS). By using machine-learning techniques, harassing online messages can be detected before a user submits it online, whereafter a message prompts the user to reconsider the post. This study builds furt...

State of the Art Digital games have evolved in the last fifteen years from providing users with pleasure and enjoyment (e.g., Sherry, 2004) towards a medium that is able to give players deeper, thought-provoking, and more emotional experiences (Bowman, 2019; Hemenover & Bowman, 2018). In line with this evolution, academic research is increasingly e...

Despite the substantial amount of literature concerning adolescent bystanders of online hate and cyberbullying, relatively little attention has been devoted to studying the same issue in adults. Similarly, the determinants of the effectiveness of different messages to support the victims or counter hate have also been understudied. The existing pie...

Combining the transactional model of stress and coping and expressive writing theory, this research studied whether writing on one’s personal experiences with the COVID-19 pandemic may improve young people’s emotional reactions to the situation. A standard expressive writing instruction was compared to a positive writing instruction (writing about...

Boredom is a prevalent and relevant, yet understudied, negative emotion in the field of media psychology. This paper proposes novel theoretical foundations to study boredom as an emotion and its related regulation strategies in the context of mobile media. Due to their pervasive nature, mobile media allow for boredom regulation via passive and (int...

During the workshop, we will firstly present a roadmap of the co-designing process, followed by some case studies showing how exactly these design stages have been employed in practice. Next, we show a step-by-step plan of how to employ this co-design in the context of designing an efficient and effective interface to support victims cope positivel...

Adolescent bullying victimization can have long-term mental health and well-being outcomes. This study focused on the potential mediating role of the perceived long-term negative and positive impact of adolescent bullying victimization to understand its relations with mental health and well-being problems during emerging adulthood. A retrospective...

ICT have exceptionally facilitated new forms of sexual harassment in the digital environment. Over half of the women in the world experienced abusive language, sexist, or misogynist comments online. Above half of the female victims experience lower self-esteem, self-confidence, or feel emotionally stressed after being exposed to online harassment....

This paper explores audience responses to the combination of comedy and human-interest television, which can lead to the simultaneous experience of hedonic enjoyment and eudaimonic appreciation. This qualitative audience study consists of 21 interviews with members of the public, reflecting on their viewing experiences of Taboe, a Flemish televisio...

The measures to fight the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic have been concentrated on inviting people to stay at home. This has reduced opportunities to exercise while also shedding some light on the importance of physical health. Based on an online survey, this paper investigated physical activity behaviours of a Belgians sample (n = 427) during the...

In the face of the 2020 global pandemic caused by COVID-19, governments have taken several measures to stop COVID-19’s spread. These measures include teleworking, cancelling major events, and limited or no access to restaurants, bars, movie theatres, and so forth. Along with COVID-19-related health concerns, these measures led to increased stress l...

Food media have become a formidable part of adolescents’ food environments. This study sought to explore how and why adolescents use food media by focusing on selectivity and motives for consumption. We conducted in-depth, semi-structured interviews with 31 Flemish adolescents aged 12 to 16. Food media were both incidentally consumed and selectivel...

This handbook provides a strong collection of communication- and psychology-based theories and models on media entertainment, which can be used as a knowledge resource for any academic and applied purpose. Its 41 chapters offer explanations of entertainment that audiences find in any kind of ‘old’ and ‘new’ media, from classic novels to VR video ga...

Emerging research has suggested that digital games can generate entertainment experiences beyond hedonic enjoyment towards eudaimonic experiences: Being emotionally moved, stimulated to reflect on one’s self or a sense of elevation. Studies in this area have mainly focused on individual game characteristics that elicit singular and static eudaimoni...

Sharing, reading and responding to personal narratives on peer-to-peer support websites may provide adolescents with informational and emotional support to feel more confident in coping with stressful events. However, their use may also pose a threat to adolescents’ coping self-efficacy. Principles of expressive writing, social sharing of emotions,...

The goal of this chapter was to describe lessons that can be learned from a qualitative study that aimed to gather perceptions that classmates have on the same negative online peer interactions within their peer group, such as online conflicts, online aggression, and cyberbullying. In order to gather these perspectives a combination of photo diarie...

Chemsex is a growing public health concern, with little evidence-based care and support available. The aim of this study is to understand current risk reduction practices, and the information and care needs of gay, bisexual, and other men who have sex with men (GBMSM) who engage in chemsex. Between January and March 2020, semi structured in-depth i...

Reports of a handful of tragic cyberbullying cases, where assumed victims have committed suicide, have revealed that purported cyberbullying attacks are sometimes actually created by the victim himself or herself (using a fake name or posting anonymously). This phenomenon has been named self-cyberbullying, fictitious cyberbullying, digital self-har...

Cyberbullying is a relatively common phenomenon, especially among children and adolescents. Scholars have paid attention to the definition, measurement, and causes of cyberbullying; the profiles of bullies, victims and bystanders; and the potential impact of this specific form of online aggression. They have also pleaded for a multi‐stakeholder app...

Modern technologies can aid working processes as well as provide individuals with an opportunity to connect and form interpersonal relationships. However, they can also create a context for displaced aggression. In this study, we examine whether people experiencing work stressors may engage in online antisocial behavioral as a means of venting thei...

Adolescents regularly observe practices of online celebrity bashing. Existing research pointed to adolescent bystanders' approving attitudes toward this practice. However, knowledge is lacking on how adolescent bystanders respond emotionally and physiologically to cases of celebrity bashing. An experimental study with two conditions (bashing/neutra...

El sexting es una de las prácticas a través de la que los jóvenes exploran su sexualidad. Aunque se recomienda responder educativamente a todas las formas en las que se puede expresar este fenómeno, en España, se ha publicado poca investigación que analice su prevalencia diferenciando los distintos tipos de comportamientos de sexting: envío, recepc...

Elevation is an eudaimonic experience that consists of heartwarming and uplifting feelings when witnessing kindness, altruism, sacrifice, or other virtues. While eudaimonic media entertainment research primarily focuses on traditional media such as movies, a limited number of recent studies look at eudaimonic game experiences, especially among adol...

The eudaimonic experience of elevation consists of heartwarming and uplifting feelings when witnessing acts of kindness, altruism, sacrifice, or other human virtues. While entertainment research primarily focuses on traditional media such as movies and general eudaimonic experiences, limited research has been conducted regarding digital games and e...

This paper explores the combination of humour and human interest television, which can lead to the simultaneous experience of hedonic enjoyment and eudaimonic appreciation, evoked by a single television programme. This qualitative audience study consists of 21 interviews with members of the general public, reflecting on their viewing experiences of...

Online celebrity bashing refers to a specific subform of online aggression in which celebrities are the targets of derogatory messages. Recent research focusing on the underlying explanations of why some bystanders turn into perpetrators of celebrity bashing suggests that human capacity for empathy may regulate the involvement in this practice. Bys...

Research shows that media entertainment can induce eudaimonic or meaningful experiences, such as being emotionally moved or being stimulated to reflect about oneself. While these studies have primarily focused on adults’ eudaimonic media entertainment experiences, the current study explores whether games can lead to eudaimonic experiences amongst a...

GOAL: Within the field of positive media psychology, research on eudaimonic media entertainment posits that both non-interactive (e.g., movies, TV series) and interactive media (e.g., digital games) have the potential to elicit emotionally moving, reflective, socially connecting or elevating experiences (Oliver & Bartsch, 2010; Oliver, Hartmann, &...

The purpose of this study is to investigate long-term outcomes of traditional bullying and cyberbullying victimization during childhood and adolescence. Today's emerging adults are the first generation that could have been victimized both offline and online. In order to understand the perceived impact of past bullying victimization on emerging adul...

Introduction. Bystanders in cyberbullying may play a crucial role in reducing cyberbullying’s harm for victims. This study assessed bystander responses, and the associations with adolescent victims’ emotional reactions to cyberbullying and victims’ mental health outcomes (symptoms of depression, anxiety and stress; suicidal ideation). Methods. A to...

One of the challenges Public Service Media institutions face today is how to translate normative values such as universality and diversity into measurable and tangible content in an attempt to realise their “public value”. This contribution shows how the communicative functions of humour can help create public value by introducing audiences to mino...

Reality-TV stars are oftentimes confronted with harsh and insulting comments, a phenomenon known as online celebrity bashing. Existing research on celebrity bashing focused especially on bystanders and perpetrators of this phenomenon and not on the victims. This study aimed to enrich the knowledge on celebrity bashing by interviewing reality-TV sta...

Research shows that media entertainment can induce meaningful experiences, such as being emotionally moved or being stimulated to reflect about oneself. While these studies have primarily focused on traditional entertainment media (such as movies) and adults, the current study explores whether games can lead to eudaimonic or meaningful experiences...

In the field of media studies, researchers can focus on a number of different aspects: motivations for media use, effects of media exposure, and the media content itself. Focusing on the latter, a content analysis can objectively, systematically, and quantitatively describe the manifest content of media messages (Berelson, 1952). However, another a...

Although the majority of research on adolescents’ online behavior has focused on antisocial behavior such as cyberbullying, adolescents more often behave prosocially than antisocially online. Research on offline prosocial behavior has shown that happiness and prosocial behavior are related. Furthermore, spillover-crossover research suggests that em...

Seeking to increase knowledge about the content and underlying messages in news articles about celebrities’ experiences with cyberbullying, this chapter reports upon the results of a framing analysis. A total of N = 106 online articles were selected from two popular American celebrity teen magazines, Seventeen and Twist magazine. The analysis revea...

This chapter provides an overview of how schools, actors in the online environment, and mass media have tried to tackle the cyberbullying problem thus far. It pays particular attention to the role of narratives in cyberbullying prevention, detection and intervention initiatives. It examines how stories are currently used: in school curricula on (cy...

Adolescents often seek and provide peer support as an effective strategy for countering cyberbullying victimization. Little is known about the actual content of such peer support, however, partly due to limitations inherent to survey, interview or focus group research. The current study examined online peer support that had been sought and provided...

This book describes innovative ways to do research about, and design interventions for, cyberbullying by children and adolescents. It does this by taking a narrative approach. How can narrative research methods complement the mostly quantitative methods (e.g. surveys, experiments, ….) in cyberbullying research ? And how can stories be used to infor...

Researchers, in studies of online news-site commenting, have found a huge number of aggressive comments and have indicated that such comments should be interpreted within the discussion context that other bystanders, such as journalists and other readers, have created. In this study, we aimed to offer insights into bystanders’ reactions to negative...

One of the challenges Public Service Media institutions face today is how to translate normative values such as universality and diversity into measurable and tangible content in an attempt to realise their “public value”. This contribution shows how the communicative functions of humour can help create public value by introducing audiences to mino...