Health appeal appraisal and memory in older adults: the effects of goal and valence framing

ABSTRACT

Relative to younger adults, older adults have a preference and memory advantage for appeals framed to focus on emotion goals (e.g., loving or caring) or positive outcomes (e.g., benefits of health behaviors). Here we examined whether combining goal (emotion vs. future) and valence framing (positive vs. negative) could optimize older adults’ appraisal and memory for health appeals. Sixty younger (ages 18–29) and 60 older (ages 64–87) adults viewed, rated and recalled one of the four versions of a health pamphlet, each with a unique combination of goal and valence framing. The results showed a memory advantage for pamphlets focusing on emotion over future goals in both age groups. Older adults also showed a more favorable appraisal and a weak memory advantage for the positively- and emotion-framed pamphlet, relative to younger adults. Thus combining goal and valence framing could optimize the effectiveness of older adults’ health appeal communication..

KEYWORDS:

• Aging
• health appeal
• appraisal
• memory
• goal framing
• valence framing

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank Andrea Wilkinson, Linda Truong, Sara Gallant, and Brenda Wong for their valuable input in the design and analysis of this project. Many thanks to all the research assistants (e.g., Khushi Patel, Shadi Sabani, and Shanelle Henry) involved in participant recruitment and data collection.

Disclosure statement

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

Funding

This work was supported by the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada (NSERC) Discovery Grants (RGPIN-2014-06153; RGPIN-2020-04978) awarded to Dr. Lixia Yang, and the NSERC USRA awarded to Dana Greenbaum. The authors have no conflict of interest in this project.

Availability of data and materials

The data of this project is accessible in Open Science Framework at https://doi.org/10.17605/OSF.IO/5WTYH.

Compliance with ethical standards

The specific study was reviewed and approved by the Psychology department ethics committee of Ryerson University (Thesis 13). The project was also under the overall NSERC ethics protocol (2009-134).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/13825585.2022.2079601

Notes

1. To examine whether the main result pattern applied to all the four appraisal outcome variables (i.e., behavior intention, informativeness, likability, and persuasion), we run an individual ANOVA on each variable. The results revealed the same age by goal framing interaction in all variables (Fs ≥ 4.155, ps ≤ .044, η²s ≥ .036), except for behavior intention (F = 1.68, p = .197). Numerically, younger adults rated future-framed pamphlets as more favorable than emotion-framed pamphlets whereas older adults did not differ between the two goal framing conditions, across the four variables. The independent samples T-tests also showed consistent favorable ratings in older relative to younger adults for the positively- and emotion-framed version (ts ≥ 3.45, ps < .002), but not any other versions (ts ≤ 1.56, ps ≥ .130), across the four variables. Bayesian analysis also strongly support the age effect in the positively- and emotion-framed pamphlet (BF₁₀ = 23.42 for behavior intention, BF₁₀ = 279.10 for informativeness, BF₁₀ = 19.39 for likability, and BF₁₀ = 16.04 for persuasion), but not the other versions (BF10 ≤ 0.65).