Along with colleagues at the UC San Diego School of Public Health, Communications Professor Dr. Jiaying Liu has been awarded funding by the National Institute on Drug Abuse! The over $3 million project period will provide five years of funding from July 2025 to April 2030. The research team will also be working closely with the Santa Barbara County Public Health Department throughout the project. The project will focus on enhancing health warning messages for recreational cannabis products in California, using experimental and eye-tracking methods.
Dr. Liu's research focuses on health communication, persuasion and social influence, message effects, computational and psychophysiological methods. Her recent research projects include conducting longitudinal analysis on nationally representative survey data to identify factors that predispose youth to cigarette and e-cigarette use; implementing online and eye-tracking experiments to identify persuasive message features and inform campaign formative evaluation; combining crowdsourcing and machine-based textual analysis to annotate large media text corpora; and employing neuroimaging methods to examine the underlying mechanisms of successful and counterproductive communication.
Her research has been published in leading communication, public health and psychology journals including Journal of Communication, Human Communication Research, Communication Research, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, Communication Methods and Measures, Health Communication, American Journal of Preventive Medicine, and Psychological Bulletin. Dr. Liu directs the Communication, Health, and Emerging Media Laboratory (CHARM Lab) at UCSB, and teaches courses in health communication, persuasion and social influence, message effects, and computational textual analysis methods.