Should we evoke fear and responsibility in management of obesity-related risk in the press?

Frontiers in Psychology

article

Jing Zhao¹  Xinmin Zheng³ 

[1] School of Foreign Languages, Fuzhou University;Department of Foreign Languages, Zhicheng College, Fuzhou University;School of Education, Shanghai International Studies University

关键词: Fear;    responsibility;    Obesity;    risk;    discourse;    corpus linguistics;    press;   

DOI  :  10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1068464

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: Frontiers

【 摘 要 】

Obesity has been considered to be a vital risk to people's health in the modern world, which arouses great anxiety among individuals, medical staff, and governance (Wexler, 2005; Segel, 2011; De Pergola and Silvestris, 2013; Malik et al., 2013; Fruh, 2017). It is obvious that people are influenced consciously or unconsciously by the press when searching for strategies to improve their health. But probably they tend to be filled with fear and guilty rather than confidence and hope as a result. To some extent, it is acknowledged that the obesity risk in media representation has been explored by Lawrence (2004), Kwan and Graves (2013), and Atanasova and Koteyko (2017). Lawrence focuses on the framing contest between personal responsibility and social environment factors. Following Lawrence, Kwan and Graves work on four categories: aesthetic, health, choice and responsibility, and social justice frames and analyze the internal contradictions within a frame and differences and similarities across frames in the production and distribution of social knowledge. Atanasova and Koteyko carry out a comparative study of how British and German newspapers construct obesity as risky. Nonetheless, more studies are needed to dig deep into how the concept of risk is related to obesity in media representation, what differences are existing between different newspapers, and what changes have taken place over time.

【 授权许可】

CC BY