Krockow Eva M
Department of Neuroscience, Psychology and Behaviour, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH, UK.
JAC Antimicrob Resist. 2020 Sep;2(3):dlaa067. doi: 10.1093/jacamr/dlaa067. Epub 2020 Aug 11.
The naming of diseases is a critical aspect of public health communication. In light of the recent renaming of the 'Wuhan novel coronavirus' to COVID-19, the names of other health threats must be reviewed. In particular, a new name is urgently needed for the global challenge typically referred to as 'antimicrobial resistance'. The current name is inconsistently used, difficult to pronounce and lacks meaning for lay audiences. It also fails to express the magnitude of the phenomenon's potential consequences for human medicine. This article reviews and evaluates key findings from several cross-disciplinary streams of research on the psycholinguistic properties of names. These include early psychology literature pertaining to the concept of 'word attensity', recent cognitive research on 'processing fluency' in the context of word recognition, and relevant marketing literature examining the components of successful branding strategies. Three key criteria-pronounceability, meaningfulness and specificity-are found to influence the perception of names and these are discussed in the context of antimicrobial resistance. The article demonstrates that the current term of 'antimicrobial resistance' falls short with regard to all three criteria and concludes with specific recommendations for the creation of a new name. Only the strategic choice of a single term that is (i) short and easy to pronounce; (ii) intuitively meaningful to lay audiences and indicative of the existential threat linked to antimicrobial resistance; and (iii) uniquely associated with the topic of antimicrobial resistance is likely to bring about overdue change in the global discussion of antimicrobial resistance.
疾病命名是公共卫生交流的一个关键方面。鉴于最近将“武汉新型冠状病毒”重新命名为COVID-19，其他健康威胁的名称也必须重新审视。特别是，对于通常被称为“抗菌药物耐药性”的全球挑战，迫切需要一个新名称。当前的名称使用不一致，发音困难，对普通大众来说缺乏意义。它也未能表达该现象对人类医学潜在后果的严重程度。本文回顾并评估了关于名称心理语言学特性的几个跨学科研究领域的关键发现。这些包括早期心理学文献中与“词汇强度”概念相关的内容、近期在单词识别背景下关于“加工流畅性”的认知研究，以及研究成功品牌战略组成部分的相关营销文献。研究发现，发音、意义和特异性这三个关键标准会影响对名称的认知，并在抗菌药物耐药性的背景下对其进行了讨论。文章表明，当前的“抗菌药物耐药性”一词在这三个标准方面均有所欠缺，并最终就新名称的创建提出了具体建议。只有战略性地选择一个单一的术语，该术语要（i）简短易发音；（ii）对普通大众来说直观上有意义，并表明与抗菌药物耐药性相关的生存威胁；（iii）与抗菌药物耐药性主题唯一相关，才有可能在全球对抗菌药物耐药性的讨论中带来姗姗来迟的改变。
