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ABSTRACT
Stories may provide a useful way of communicating about health and promoting engagement for health promotion campaigns. In this study, we examined the effectiveness of a particular type of narrative, restorative narratives (stories that highlight hope and resilience), relative to negative narratives (stories that focus on suffering or challenges). We also tested the effect of labeling the story as fact or fiction. The results suggested that restorative narratives may foster greater prosocial behavior than negative narratives and effectiveness does not differ depending on whether a story is labeled as “factual” or “fictional.” Our findings offer encouraging implications for future promotional efforts by health organizations.
Notes
1. The original article is available at the American Cancer Society’s website, https://www.cancer.org/latest-news/lung-cancer-survivor-copes-with-unexpected-diagnosis.html. Experimental versions are available from the authors upon request.
2. We also included emotion regulation, character identification, transportation, and resilience as exploratory measures. There was no significant effect of our manipulations on these variables. Participants also indicated if they had read the story before (n = 6), if they or their family/friends had been affected by Wegener’s GPA (n = 4), and if they had donated to a disease research organization in the past year (n = 39). However, these variables were not used in analysis.
3. We conducted separate indirect effect tests for each of the five willingness to help behaviors, using each of our four affect composites as the mediator (20 total tests).
