Effects of Health Responsibility Frames on Attributions, Emotions, and Social Support Intentions in the Context of Dementias

ABSTRACT

When news stories cover health and diseases, they often address issues of responsibility. These responsibility frames can affect recipients’ responsibility beliefs (i.e., attributions) and thereby affect emotions and motivations to support people affected by health problems. To date, it is not fully understood how responsibility frames affect these attributions, emotions, and social support intentions in the context of dementia. In an online experiment with N = 1,059 German participants, we tested the effects of different responsibility frames (individual vs. contextual) on social support intentions through responsibility attributions and emotional reactions in the context of dementia. Results show that responsibility frames affect responsibility attributions and social support intentions. Mediation analysis shows that the effect of contextual responsibility frames on social support intention is partially mediated by responsibility attribution and emotions (sympathy and anger). We discuss these findings considering framing effects research and media coverage.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10410236.2024.2307204

Notes

1. The online experiment was originally conducted in a 2 (individual responsibility frame/contextual responsibility frame) × 2 (textual frames/visual frames) between-subjects design. The factor visual framing is not considered here, as it is not relevant for the investigated effects. The results on visual framing are reported in Berlekamp et al. (2022).

2. For the purpose of incentivization, participants received virtual points from the panel provider, which they could subsequently exchange for gift vouchers for selected online stores (e.g., Amazon).

3. Lists of all items measured in the questionnaire can be found in supplementary material 2–4.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft under Grant [404881979]. This research received no further specific grant from any other funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-profit sectors.