Health Messaging to Individuals Who Perceive Ambiguity in Health Communications: The Promise of Self-Affirmation

Abstract

The perception that extant health messages about risk factors for a disease are ambiguous can be associated with greater anxiety and reduced interest in taking precautionary action. In this experiment, 247 female alcohol consumers who perceived varying degrees of ambiguity in current cancer prevention messages read an unambiguous article about the documented link between alcohol consumption and breast cancer. Before reading the article, half were given the opportunity to self-affirm by reflecting on an important value—a technique previously shown to enhance receptivity to threatening messages. The authors found that self-affirmation increased message acceptance among those who perceived relatively higher levels of ambiguity in cancer communications. Also, the relation between perceived ambiguity and risk perception became positive among self-affirmed participants, suggesting they had become less defensive. Self-affirmation may be an effective technique to use when delivering health communications to audiences who perceive a lack of consistency in prevention messages.

Acknowledgments

The authors thank Robin Bott, Jason Choorapuzha, Elizabeth Conjar, Alyssa Heintzelmann, Melinda Kelly, Samantha Maxwell, Lucy Napper, Yvonne Saadi, Michelle Scott, Jacob Shratter, and Olivia Stapinski for assistance in collecting data for this experiment.

Notes

¹Although the main effects of self-affirmation and perceived ambiguity were close to statistical significance and in the predicted direction, we do not interpret them given the presence of a significant interaction. The effects are also nonsignificant in an analysis that excludes the interaction term.

²Further probing of these effects through simple slopes analyses indicated that among those participants in the no-affirmation condition, perceived ambiguity was unrelated to message acceptance (B = −0.08, p = .35). However, for participants in the self-affirmation condition, there was a positive association between perceived ambiguity and message acceptance that approached significance (B = 0.13, p = .07). Moreover, the pattern was the same when analyzing each of the two ambiguity items separately, though not at conventional levels of statistical significance.

³There was also no interaction between self-affirmation and perceived ambiguity on perceived vulnerability.

⁴More information about any of the published analyses based on data collected in the parent study can be obtained from the first author.