Appetitive Food, Aversive Warning: Interaction Effects of Visual and Verbal Cues on Psychophysiological and Attitudinal Responses to PSAs

ABSTRACT

The efforts to promote healthy eating remain ineffective. The inability of these campaigns to counter the marketing resources of the mainstream fast-food chains is among the primary explanations for such failures. However, from the information processing perspective, the message’s features may also play a significant role. Cue reactivity research has shown the importance of evaluating visual and verbal cues to avoid undesirable addictive behavioral outcomes. Bridging the evaluative space model (ESM) and the limited capacity model of motivated mediated message processing (LC4MP), the goal of this experiment is to further explore how food-related visual and verbal cues elicit psychophysiological reactivity and how this reactivity in turn affects attitudes toward the promotion. Multilevel modeling results showed that healthy food images paired with encouragement words elicited an uncoupled pattern of the appetitive system activation and received a predominantly positive attitude from audiences (N = 180). Results suggested that thematic congruent messages are preferred in health communication settings. Junk food images, regardless of being paired with encouragement or discouragement verbal cues, should be avoided due to their automatic activation of the appetitive motivational system.

Acknowledgments

This research was conducted as part of Mingxuan’s master’s thesis (Liu, 2018) at University of California, Davis. The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for their valuable feedback, our lab mates You Zhan and Xudong Yu for their help with the experiment implementation, and Steve Lei for designing the data merging software Zircle (Lei, 2018).

Disclosure Statement

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

Data Availability Statement

The data described in this article are available from the corresponding author upon request.

Open Scholarship

This article has earned the Center for Open Science badge for Open Materials. The materials are openly accessible at https://osf.io/9vnzu/?view_only=190cfadec02f446797a0a816b5ab0313.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.