Lee receives award for mental health messaging research

Murrow researcher Yen-I Lee's project to help encourage international students to access mental health services earned a $10,000 award from the Association for Education in Journalism and Mass Communication. The award will support the effort to develop and test messaging to help break down cultural barriers for the students to seek mental health assistance for their friends or themselves.

Living far from home in an unfamiliar culture, international college students can face issues such as depression and anxiety, said Lee, an assistant professor in Washington State University's Murrow College of Communication. At the same time, many come from cultures where seeking help for mental health issues is viewed as weak or shameful.

To help combat these attitudes, Lee plans to develop and test video messages that appeal to international students' emotions in different ways to determine which are the most effective. The goal is to help inform communications from universities and other organizations so that they reach more students who need help, more effectively.

"This award gives great support for my research which I hope will be really helpful for the mental health of any population from different cultural backgrounds," said Lee.

The project will be conducted in two phases over two years. The first phase will involve interviewing student participants from Washington State University, University of Idaho, and Eastern Washington University about their perceptions of mental health challenges and what might persuade them to seek help. Using the insights from these interviews, Lee's research team will design video messages and then test their effect on student participants using the physiological measures available through the Murrow Media Mind Lab. These involve collecting people's reactions to messages that appeal to their emotions by having them answer survey questions and measuring physical stress responses like heart rate, eye movement, and skin reactions.

The research team will use the Murrow Mobile Lab to conduct these tests on the WSU Pullman campus and at the partner universities using the mobile media mind lab. Results are expected in late 2025.