RT Book, Section A1 Bekalu, Mesfin A. A1 Viswanath, K. A2 Boulton, Matthew L. A2 Wallace, Robert B. SR Print(0) ID 1182684873 T1 Health Communications T2 Maxcy-Rosenau-Last Public Health & Preventive Medicine, 16e YR 2022 FD 2022 PB McGraw Hill PP New York, NY SN 9781259644511 LK accessmedicine.mhmedical.com/content.aspx?aid=1182684873 RD 2024/03/28 AB Health communication is now considered as critical to understanding and explaining how health behaviors are initiated, changed, and maintained. While communication has always been considered an important mechanism to reinforce or promote health behaviors, transformative developments in information and communication technologies, and their broad and deep penetration make understanding the role of communication central to them. Yet the role of communication is often misunderstood with the assumption that communication has a direct influence on health behaviors. While there are conditions under which that is empirically true, more often communication has a powerful influence on critical antecedents to health behaviors. Understanding the influence of communication on the antecedents and the pathways and mechanisms through which the influence flows is central to studies of health behavior and it is here that health communication theories work in conjunction with health behavior theories.