Marketers often use numerical comparisons in promotional claims to signal superior product offerings. A potentially misleading practice involves omitting the reference point deliberately in order to make the focal claim more appealing-a persuasion tactic referred to as "baseline omission" in the present research. In two experiments, this research demonstrates that consumers tend to perceive this tactic as more effective on others than on themselves. The self-others difference is more salient among consumers with more persuasion knowledge. Consumers' concerns about its effectiveness on themselves, rather than on others, better predict their supportiveness to regulate the use of baseline omission.

Approximately 20 million people in the United States have genital human papillomavirus (HPV), a sexually transmitted infection linked to cancer. We examined the news information presented about the HPV vaccine in major U.S. newspapers over the 19 months following its Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval. To answer the question of how news information is presented in ways that might influence public health, we explored the frequency of cancer prevention and sexually transmitted infection prevention message frames used to describe the HPV vaccine, the extent to which journalists relied on official sources, and the presence of personal examples. A content analysis of 547 newspaper articles revealed that less than half of the articles provided detailed health information. Of the articles that contained a message frame, cancer prevention was most frequently employed. Government/political sources, medical doctors, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were the most commonly cited sources. Finally, we found that only 16% of all the articles we sampled featured personal accounts. Together, our findings suggest that U.S. newspaper coverage lacked detailed information about both HPV and the HPV vaccine in spite of federal approval of the vaccine, legal mandates for the vaccine, and a widespread information campaign. Implications for public health are discussed.

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A growing body of evidence suggests that entertainment-education (EE) is a promising health communication strategy. The purpose of this study was to identify some of the factors that facilitate and hinder audience involvement with EE messages. Using confirmatory factor analysis, the authors introduce a construct they call experiential involvement, which describes the experience of being cognitively and emotionally involved with EE messages and is a product of transportation into an EE text and identification with EE characters. Using an experimental design, the authors also investigated how reports of experiential involvement and health information recall varied depending on the degree to which the educational content was well integrated with the narrative content in EE messages. Findings indicated that integration significantly influenced health information recall. Results indicated that experiential involvement and the perception that the health topic in EE messages was personally relevant predicted participants' systematic processing of the information in EE messages. Contrary to expectation, personal relevance did not predict experiential involvement, and systematic message processing was negatively related to health information recall. Implications for the construction of EE messages and the study of the EE strategy are discussed.

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