Social psychology has been known to be an important paradigm in communication research. With the evolution of social psychology, media effect scholars have challenged a traditional stimulus-response (S-R) approach, which assumes only direct and automatic effects of media stimuli on audiences' responses, and have started acknowledging the important role of indirect effects or mediations. Likewise, health communication researchers are increasingly interested in understanding the mechanisms through which audiences attend and respond to health messages from various mass media outlets. To investigate these mechanisms, scholars explore how audiences' orientation toward health care issues affects the way they process health-related messages and, further, how this orientation affects cognitive and behavioral outcomes.

One model used to pursue this investigation is the Orientation 1-Stimulus-Orientation 2-Response (O-S-O-R) model, which was originally ...