Doing What Makes You Happy: Health Message Framing for Younger and Older Adults

ABSTRACT

Background: Health-related messages, framed in terms of gains or losses, can impact decision-making differently across the adult life span. The focus of this study was on the emotional responses evoked by such framing and their relationship to perceived effectiveness, as mechanisms that may underpin how health messages impact health decisions.

Methods: A web-based study using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk platform was conducted with a sample of 132 younger adults and 106 older adults. Participants were asked to read exercise-related messages framed in terms of gains or losses, and to rate each message for affect and effectiveness.

Results: Relative to younger adults, older adults showed less negative reactions to loss-framed messages and to messages that described undesirable outcomes. Importantly, younger and older adults differentially used affective cues to gauge effectiveness of framed messages: for gain-framed messages (which tended to evoke positive affect), older adults found messages that made them feel good to be more effective; but for loss-framed messages (which tend to evoke negative affect), younger adults found messages that made them feel bad to be more effective.

Conclusions: These results suggest that in processing health messages, older adults may be more motivated by positive affect, while younger adults may be more motivated by negative affect.

Author Note

Xiaomei Liu, Department of Educational Psychology and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; Michael M. Shuster, Department of Psychology, DePaul University; Joseph A. Mikels, Department of Psychology, DePaul University; Elizabeth A. L. Stine-Morrow, Department of Educational Psychology and Beckman Institute, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.

Notes

¹ The recruitment had two stages: The study was first posted without targeting a specific age range, in which 135 younger adults aged from 18 to 39 years old and 17 older adults aged older than 60 years old were recruited. There were also 50 middle-aged adults aged from 40 to 59 years old that were recruited, but because this study aimed to compare just younger and older adults, the responses collected from those middle-aged participants were not included for data analysis. To recruit additional older participants, the study was posted again on Mechanical Turk, targeting participants older than 60 years old, which resulted in recruiting an additional 90 older adults who did not participate in the study in the first stage recruitment.

² The physical activity level was not related to any of the rating measures (i.e., affect and effectiveness rating scores), and so was not incorporated into later analyses.

³ We did not break this down further by Outcome condition, given the generally subtle effects of this variable on affect and effectiveness. Collapsing across Outcome also provided us with more reliable estimates of the effects of Frame.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by the National Institute on Aging Grant R01-AG 043533.