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Background: In 2014, the Government of India's Ministry of Health & Family Welfare constituted an expert group for development of pictorial health warnings for tobacco products. Accordingly, six prototypes were developed with warnings displayed on the front and back occupying 85 percent of the space. The packs visually showed the adverse impact of tobacco consumption. The prototypes were pretested. The objective of the pretest was to assess the effectiveness of the health warnings and messages on different target groups in terms of noticeability, comprehension, informativeness, credibility, legibility, clarity of color & design, and intention to change behavior. The main task of the study was to exhibit six types of pack warnings developed separately for cigarette, bidi, and smokeless tobacco users and non-users and rank them based on their reactions to each of the attributes listed above. Methods: The pre-testing was undertaken in one district each of the three states of India. In all, the study area covered 28 locations. The total number of respondents was 300 comprising of tobacco users and non-users. The sample included adult women and men. The study used qualitative methodology for pre-testing the pack warnings on cigarette, bidi and smokeless tobacco packs. It conducted: 28 focus group discussions and 20 in depth interviews. Results: The study concluded that the image on cigarette, bidi or smokeless tobacco packs is the main source of information. Pack warnings which showed damage on the face or a disease were more impactful and understood. Cigarette/ Bidi are often bought loose, especially by those who are in the age group 18-25 years. Hence, the likelihood of noticing the pack warning is much lower by this age group. Conclusions: The study recommended that the image and the written warning on the pack must match and must be in English and an Indian language.

Video and mobile games have been shown to have a positive impact on behavior change in children. However, the potential impact of game play patterns on outcomes of interest are yet to be understood, especially for games with implicit learning components. This study investigates the immediate impact of fooya!, a pediatric dietary mobile game with implicit learning components, on food choices. It also quantifies children's heterogeneous game play patterns using game telemetry and determines the effects of these patterns on players' food choices. We analyzed data from a randomized controlled trial (RCT) involving 104 children, aged 10 to 11 years, randomly assigned to the treatment group (played fooya!, a dietary mobile game developed by one of the authors) or the control group (played Uno, a board game without dietary education). Children played the game for 20 minutes each in two sessions. After playing the game in each session, the children were asked to choose 2 out of 6 food items (3 healthy and 3 unhealthy choices). The number of healthy choices in both sessions was used as the major outcome. We first compared the choice and identification of healthy foods between treatment and control groups using statistical tests. Next, using game telemetry, we determined the variability in game play patterns by quantifying game play measures and modeled the process of game playing at any level across all students as a Markov chain. Finally, correlation tests and regression models were used to establish the relationship between game play measures and actual food choices. We saw a significant main effect of the mobile game on number of healthy foods actually chosen (treatment 2.48, control 1.10; P<.001; Cohen d=1.25) and identified (treatment 7.3, control 6.94; P=.048; Cohen d=.25). A large variation was observed in children's game play patterns. Children played an average of 15 game levels in 2 sessions, with a range of 2 to 23 levels. The greatest variation was noted in the proportion of scoring activities that were highly rewarded, with an average of 0.17, ranging from 0.003 to 0.98. Healthy food choice was negatively associated with the number of unhealthy food facts that children read in the game (Kendall τ=-.32, P=.04), even after controlling for baseline food preference. A mobile video game embedded with implicit learning components showed a strong positive impact on children's food choices immediately following the game. Game telemetry captured children's different play patterns and was associated with behavioral outcomes. These results have implications for the design and use of mobile games as an intervention to improve health behaviors, such as the display of unhealthy food facts during game play. Longitudinal RCTs are needed to assess long-term impact. ClinicalTrials.gov NCT04082195; https://clinicaltrials.gov/ct2/show/NCT04082195, registered retrospectively.

The study examines how emotional expression through emojis impacts Gen Z customers' purchase intentions. It specifically examines the moderating effect of Relationship Norm Orientation (RNO) and the mediating role of positive affect in the broader context of brand communication. To test the suggested moderated mediation model, 149 Gen Z individuals were selected using a survey-based approach. The results show that emoji-based emotional expressions considerably raised purchase intention, mostly through positive affect. RNO, on the other hand, mitigated this link, making those who were more communally oriented have a less strong emotional reaction. The results emphasize the value of authenticity in Gen Z's emotionally expressive marketing and offer both theoretical and practical guidance for improving the rapidly evolving field of digital brand communication.

In this study, we describe the Facebook-use behaviour of a segment of college-going Indian youths. A survey of 455 students revealed that they started using the Internet in their teens and that they spend on average 1.6 hours a day on Facebook. Male and female students do not differ significantly in spending time on either the Internet or Facebook. The female respondents tend to be more connected than their male counterparts. Despite showing more connectedness, female students tend to be choosier while accepting friends' requests than their male counterparts. Factor analysis revealed five major gratifications the student-users seek while using Facebook: relationship maintenance, userfriendliness, relaxation, connecting with old friends and social interaction.

Several Uses and Gratification (U&G) studies provide bases for understanding motivations for the uses of traditional mass media such as television and radio. U&G research on internet has tended to rely on studies of such traditional media. This paper assumes that internet is a unique medium and offers a set of gratifications different from those offered by traditional mass media. This study, therefore, sought to first identify motivations for using the internet and then extract the structure of gratifications. In addition, it segementated the internet users based on derived gratification dimensions and their usage pattern. The study identified a six-factor gratification structure. It identified two segments among the respondents. The article concludes with the conclusions and discussion part where theoretical and managerial implications are discussed along with the limitations and future scope of the study. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

This study sought to explore and evaluate the role and effectiveness of information campaigns and a social stratification variable in the destigmatization process. For this purpose, an experimental study was designed to determine the relative effectiveness of diffusion and participatory strategies and the effect of caste on three dependent variables conceptualized as contributing to leprosy destigmatization. The study was conducted in the Gwalior county of the Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. A non-equivalent control group design was employed. Three villages were randomly assigned to the diffusion, participatory, and control treatments. About 90 randomly chosen adult male and female respondents belonging to low and high castes participated in a health education camp in the diffusion and participatory villages. Free medical treatment for skin diseases was administered in the control village. A pretest-posttest design was used. The instruments for the two tests were almost identical and were developed by the researcher in consultation with experts. Multivariate analysis (MANOVA) of the three correlated dependent variables of knowledge, perception of risk, and behavioral involvement for the pretest showed significant interaction between the two factors of communication treatment and caste at.05 level of significance. The pretest was used as a covariate to achieve pre-experimental equivalence. Posttest multivariate analysis of covariance (MANCOVA) found significant differences between the three communication treatments on the dependent variables. The discriminant analysis procedure was used to locate the source of difference. This procedure identified two significant discriminant functions. The first significant function was essentially a knowledge-perception of risk dimension of destigmatization that separated participatory from the diffusion and control treatment villages. That is, the participatory treatment village showed higher knowledge and lower perception of risk. The second significant function of destigmatization located the variable of behavioral involvement on one end and self-perception of risk on the other. The second function best separated the diffusion from the participatory and control treatment villages. The diffusion treatment village showed lower self-perception of risk but the participatory and control treatment villages showed higher behavioral involvement with leprosy patients. To summarize, the participatory treatment village showed higher knowledge and lower perception of risk on the first dimension, and higher behavioral involvement on the second dimension, but the diffusion treatment village showed only lower self-perception of risk on the second dimension. The study concluded that participatory strategies promoting interaction and incorporating people's knowledge and action component result in increased knowledge, lower perception of risk, higher behavioral involvement, and hence, destigmatization. The findings of the study are explained using the health belief model, the contact hypothesis, and the theory of social support.