Responses to messages about health behaviors: The influence of repressive coping

Abstract

This study examined the impact of messages that promoted health behaviors on repressors (persons who report low levels of anxiety and a high need to appear socially desirable), high anxiety participants (persons who report high levels of anxiety and a low need to appear socially desirable), and low anxiety participants (persons who report low anxiety and a low need to appear socially desirable). It was hypothesized that repressors would be more influenced by messages encouraging health promotion behaviors than messages encouraging disease detection behaviors. Also it was hypothesized that low anxiety participants and high anxiety participants would be equally influenced by messages about both types of behavior. To test these hypotheses 40 repressors, 40 high anxiety, and 40 low anxiety participants were randomly assigned to read a message that encouraged the performance of either a disease detection or health promotion behavior. Then participants were asked to indicate their intention to perform the behavior and then were asked to recall the message. The results indicated that repressors spent less time reading the messages and recalled less of the messages about detection behaviors than messages about promotion behaviors.

Keywords:

• Health behavior
• repression
• persuasion

Notes

Endnotes

1. The mixed group (high anxiety and high defensiveness) was not considered because there were no hypothesis concerning their reactions to health messages.

2. A couple of analyses were conducted to rule out the impact of control variables. First, the specific behavior (low fat diet/cholesterol check, regular exercise/blood pressure examinations, and sunscreen/skin cancer self-examinations) was added as a factor to the main analyses of the participants’ intentions. In this analysis this factor was not involved in any significant interactions. Second, in another analysis gender was added as a factor to the main analyses. In this analysis gender was not involved in any significant effects.

3. Two participants failed to complete the recall measure and were not included in this analysis.

4. The variables of behavior type and classification type were centered in each of these models in order to reduce multicolinearity. See Jaccard, Wan, and Turrisi (1990) for discussion on interaction terms.