What health-relevant information do you seek? What
health-relevant information do you avoid? What health-relevant
information do you act upon? What health-relevant information do you not
act upon?
The answers depend on factors contained in your personality, in
messages, and in the interactions between your personality and the
messages. Let's discuss some of the more important of these.
The first is a dimension that underscores the role of personality
that I discussed in a previous post: promotion versus prevention.
Persons with a promotion orientation mostly look for, attend to, and act upon
information that emphasizes health advantages contained within messages.
Conversely, those with a prevention orientation mostly look for, attend to, and
act upon information that emphasizes health dangers contained within
messages. For example, an article or video that extensively details the
many benefits of adopting a stress management program would be particularly
appealing to a promotion oriented person, whereas one that extensively details
the many dangers of failing to adopt a stress management program would be
particularly appealing to a prevention oriented person.
Moreover, since perceived advantages mostly are subjective, how
one frames an event is determinative. The advantage that you perceive
reveals your personality. If you chose a promotion reason, you are
“eager’ about the outcome that you expect to derive from your healthful change.
And if you chose a prevention reason, you are “vigilant’ about the outcome that
you fear from not making the healthful change. Eager anticipation
suggests that you have a more hopeful orientation and vigilant anticipation,
that you have a more fearful orientation.
The second is a dimension that underscores the role of
messages. Specifically, Matthias R. Hastall and Anna J. M.Wagner (2017)
have introduced the notion of high-susceptibility and low-susceptibility
messages. Some health messages – such as printed material or videos -
are framed to emphasize gain whereas others emphasize loss. Since
gain messages directly or implicitly elaborate practices that benefit our
physical or mental selves, they are more likely to attract the attention of
persons with a promotion orientation, who are very susceptible to
gain messages. Conversely, loss messages that directly or implicitly
elaborate practices that undermine our physical or mental selves are most
likely to attract the attention of persons with a prevention orientation who are very susceptible to loss messages.
The third dimension concerns responses to threatening messages.
Some individuals are called "sensitizers" because they direct
their attention toward potential threats in order to confront them head-on.
Others are "repressors" who turn their attention away from
potential threats, essentially denying danger.
So, when thinking about yourself, you might want to consider how
you stand on the three dimensions: 1) promotion vs prevention, 2) susceptibility
to gain vs susceptibility to loss, and 3) sensitizing vs repressing.
Equally important is how the three interact among themselves and with
other features of your personality. There is no straightforward equation
that will enable you to use your understanding of the dimensions. Since
we all are unique, the possibilities are limitless. Let's consider a
simplified situation merely for illustration.
Imagine that I primarily am a promoter with a strong inclination
toward gain and that I have a sensitizing orientation. I see a health video about a
recent study emphasizing that direct sun exposure between the hours of 10:00
a.m. and 2:00 p.m. increases skin cancer risk. Taken at face value, given my
promoter-gain status, one might presume that I would be less inclined to attend
to this than to a message that emphasized health-enhancing sun exposure
practices. On the other hand, since I am a sensitizer, taken at face
value, I might be inclined to attend to the skin cancer risk message in order
to combat the implied danger. There is, then, a kind of intrapersonal struggle
that will determine how the three dimensions interact with my overall
personality. As important, perhaps even more important, are contextual factors specific to me. For instance, if my sibling developed a melanoma, that
quite likely would trump everything else in directing my behavior. Conversely,
if I am a top-flight inveterate golfer, that fact quite likely would be pivotal
in determining my decision about accepting sun exposure.
Since only you can answer the health-relevant questions about
information that you seek, avoid, act upon, and not act upon, by considering
the three aforementioned dimensions, their interactions, and your unique
contexts, you will be better equipped to validly decide health-critical
questions.
References
Hastall, M. & Wagner, A.
(2017). Enhancing Selective Exposure to
Health Messages and Health Intentions: Effects of Susceptibility Cues and
Gain–Loss Framing. Journal of Media Psychology: Theories, Methods, and Applications,
January 18, No Pagination Specified. doi:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1027/1864-1105/a000197
No comments:
Post a Comment