Transcript Investigating discrimination in a community health department: A

Action Tendency Emotions Evoked by Memorable
Breast Cancer Messages and their Association with
Prevention and Detection Behaviors
Sandi Smith, Lauren Hamel, Michael Kotowski, Samantha
Nazione, Carolyn LaPlante, Charles Atkin, Cynthia Stohl,
& Christine Skubisz.
This research was supported by the Breast Cancer and the Environment
Research Centers grant number U01 ES012800 from the National Institute of
Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS), and the National Cancer Institute
(NCI), NIH, DHHS.
Memorable Messages
• Messages which are remembered for long
periods of time
• Can serve as guides to behavior
– Control theory
• Women with personal experience and with close
friends or relatives who had experiences with
breast cancer were more likely to recall
memorable messages about breast cancer
– Messages about awareness, early detection,
prevention, and treatment
– With purposes of giving facts, advice, or hope
– From media and interpersonal sources
Emotions
• Emotions - Internal mental states that result from
an evaluation of people, events, or objects (and
we extend to messages here)
• Emotions can be divided into goal incongruent
emotions (negative emotions) and goal
congruent emotions (positive emotions)
– Negative – anger, sadness, fear
– Positive – hope, relief
• Separate emotions are postulated to have
different problem-solving action tendencies
Action Tendencies
• Anger can elicit problem solving behaviors
• Sadness can slow cognitive functioning and lead
to problem solving behaviors
• Fear can be debilitating at high levels but a
moderate amount can motivate problem solving
or problem avoiding behaviors
• Hope has no clear action tendency but it is
thought to be associated with action toward what
one desires
• Relief results in very little action
Methods
• 359 female participants took an online survey
– Mostly Caucasian, middle-aged women who had
completed at least some college
– 60% had a memorable message about breast cancer
and were asked about characteristics of it such as
emotions it evoked.
– Asked about detection and prevention behaviors
• Topics, sources, and emotions of memorable
messages were coded reliably (Kappa ranged
from .81 to 1)
Results: Evoked emotions
• The top two evoked emotions were sadness and
fear
• Emotions were most frequently evoked by
messages from interpersonal sources such as
friends and family but also from medical
professionals and media sources
• Sadness was evoked most highly by detection
messages, fear by prevention messages, and
hope by treatment messages
Results
• H1: Contrary to expectation, memorable
messages about breast cancer that
evoked anger were not associated with
prevention and detection behaviors.
• H2: Also contrary to expectation,
memorable messages about breast cancer
that evoked sadness were not associated
with prevention and detection behaviors
Results: H3&4
• H3: Partially consistent with expectation, women with
memorable messages about breast cancer that evoked
fear were more likely to engage in detection behaviors
than those whose messages did not evoke fear, however
they were not more likely to report prevention behaviors.
• H4: Contrary to expectation, women with memorable
messages about breast cancer that evoked negative
emotions (anger, sadness or fear) were not more likely to
report prevention and detection behaviors than those
whose messages evoked positive emotions (hope or
relief).
Results: RQ1&2
• RQ1: Will women with memorable messages about
breast cancer that evoked hope be more likely to report
prevention and detection behaviors than those whose
messages did not evoke hope? The answer is no.
• RQ2: Will women with memorable messages about
breast cancer that evoked relief be more likely to report
prevention and detection behaviors than those whose
messages did not evoke relief?
– Women recalling memorable messages evoking relief were not
any more likely to report prevention behaviors
– Women recalling memorable messages that evoked relief were
less likely to report that they engaged in detection behaviors
Discussion
• This research adds to past emotion research
– Fear and sadness were most frequently evoked
– Sadness was mostly evoked by detection messages, fear by
prevention messages, and hope by treatment messages.
– Interpersonal sources of memorable messages that evoke
emotions are powerful
• Messages that invoked fear were positively associated
and messages that evoked relief were negatively
associated with detection behaviors
• There is a trend for actions to occur most when a
negative emotion is evoked, less so when a positive
emotion is evoked, but least when no emotion is evoked
Conclusion
• There is promise for the strategic use of
message type, source, and evoked action
tendency emotions in breast cancer
interventions
• Family and friends are powerful sources of
memorable messages about breast cancer
• Fear is the emotion most likely to lead to action
• Further emotion and memorable message
research is necessary in health and other
contexts