Defensive reactions to health-promoting information: an overview and implications for future research

Abstract

It is a common finding that recipients of threatening health-promoting information are motivated to dismiss or disregard the information, thus reacting ‘defensively’. This article gives an overview of the literature on defensive reactions to health-promoting information. A distinction is made between: (1) avoidance, (2) denial, (3) cognitive reappraisal and (4) suppression. Although these defensive reactions have been studied repeatedly and thoroughly, we propose that a number of questions remain unanswered. First, little is known about whether avoidance, denial, cognitive reappraisal and suppression have distinct or similar effects on emotional experience and health-conducive behaviour. Second, little is known about the development of defensive reactions over time in case recipients are repeatedly exposed to health-promoting information, which is often the case in a real-life setting. In the present article, we present preliminary answers to these questions, suggesting that cognitive reappraisal has greater potential to result in effective emotion regulation and is more likely to impede healthy behaviour than the other three strategies. We also propose that defensive reactions to health-promoting information do not always reduce health-conducive responses but can co-occur with more adaptive responses or even facilitate them. Finally, we present a hypothesised model of the development of defensiveness over time.

Keywords:

• health communication
• persuasion
• defensive reactions
• motivated reasoning

Notes

1. In the present article we will refer to effective defensive reactions as reactions that are successful in reducing negative emotions as a result of threatening health messages. Note that effective defensive reactions can lead to less instead of more persuasion and can thus impede the effectiveness of health-promoting messages.

2. Terror Management Theory also delineates a process which is similar to cognitive reappraisal. In a number of studies, evidence was found that people control their anxiety by cultivating beliefs that validate their particular cultural worldview or by engaging in cognitive or behavioural efforts aimed at increasing self-esteem (e.g., Arndt, Greenberg, & Cook, 2002; Taubman-Ben-Ari, 2000). It seems that, as a result of mortality salience, the threat of death is neither deni. ed or dismissed, but additional beliefs are adopted to make the thought of dying less frightening.

3. Sensitisation, on the other hand, a process in which people get more and more emotionally responsive over time has been known to reverse habituation (Hergenhan & Olson, 1993) and may nudge people's defensive system in the opposite direction.