Sensation seeking and dosage effect: An exploration of the role of surprise in anti-cocaine messages

Abstract

This article examines emotional and cognitive responses to graphic illustrations of the effects of cocaine among a sample of low and high sensation seekers (LSS & HSS). Two-hundred-and-five (n = 205) undergraduate students at a large northern university in the United Kingdom participated in the study and were randomly assigned to one of two conditions: low-image or high-image print adverts about the consequences of cocaine use. Results indicated that although high sensation seekers report greater cocaine use as compared with low sensation seekers, report less surprise and have less dominant cognitions than LSS, they do not differ from LSS in terms of other affective responses when exposed to anti-cocaine visual messages. However, the high-image advert was more successful than the low-image adverts in eliciting surprise, which has important theoretical and empirical implications for the design of effective messages targeting HSS.

• Cocaine use
• sensation seeking
• emotions
• visual messages
• dosage effect

Acknowledgements

Smita C. Banerjee is a Research Affiliate for Communication and Health Issues Partnership for Education and Research at Rutgers University. Kathryn Greene and Itzhak Yanovitzky are Associate Professors in the Department of Communication at Rutgers University.

Declaration of interest

The authors report no conflicts of interest. The authors alone are responsible for the content and writing of the paper.

Notes

¹We created two versions of the low-image advert to address potential order effects. Independent sample t-tests were conducted to identify differences in affective responses and cognitive responses, with results showing no differences in the two adverts with respect to any of the dependent variables. Thus, data for the two versions of the low-image advert were combined into one category.

²Before conducting ANCOVAs, the homogeneity-of-slopes assumption was first tested (see Green, Salkind, & Akey, 2000). This test evaluates the interaction between the covariate and the factor in predicting the dependent variable. A significant interaction suggests that the differences on the dependent variable among groups vary as a function of the covariate and not the factors. ANCOVA was carried out only when the interaction was not significant. In instances where the interaction was significant, group-by-covariate interaction was evaluated instead of ANCOVA. More details are available from the first author.