Can You Feel It? Negative Emotion, Risk, and Narrative in Health Communication

Abstract

Eliciting emotional responses to mass media messages can be an effective means of changing public health attitudes, intentions and behaviors. This conceptual paper proposes that emotional responses to such media messages can be message-referent, plot-referent, and/or self-referent. Self-referent emotional responses are expected to have a direct effect in motivating behavior change, particularly as they are likely to be associated with an increase in perceived personal risk. Message-referent and plot-referent emotional responses are proposed to have indirect effects on the individual, primarily by stimulating self-referent emotions, and prompting interpersonal discussion about the message. In this paper, it is argued that narrative is a particularly effective message format with which to elicit self-referent emotional responses.

Notes

∗p < .05

∗∗p < .01

∗∗∗p < .001.

∗p < .05

∗∗p < .01

∗∗∗p < .001.

1. Full details of these studies will be reported elsewhere and are available from the authors.

2. Neither of the messages used in these studies contained images that were graphic or novel, therefore we did not expect a high level of message-referent emotions.

3. Mediation analyses were conducted, with two multiple regression analyses for each study. The first was to predict self-referencing from transportation and sex, the second to predict fear from self-referencing, controlling for transportation and sex. Sobel tests showed that these mediations were significant (Study 1: z = 4.12, p < .001; Study 2: z = 3.5, p < .001).