Test of the Activation of Approach and Avoidance Motivations in Response to Health Messages

• In Event: ICA Plenary Interactive Paper/Poster Session III
  In Interactive Paper Session: Health Communication Interactive Poster Session

Abstract

Most extant work on health message processing assumes that people are motivated to either move toward a message-recommended behavior or away from it. Health message design has similarly focused on either increasing approach motivation or reducing avoidance motivation. This one-sided focus is based on the bipolar structuralization of motivational valence systems, in which an increase in positivity is equivalent to the decrease in negativity and thus the two cannot co-occur. The present research challenges this prevalent proposition by testing an alternative perspective—the bivariate model—in which these opposite motivations are hypothesized to be separable, and thus able to occur in both reciprocal and non-reciprocal ways. Findings from different analytical methods employed in this study (N=311, Mage=20.29; 67.5% female; 66.2% Caucasian, Stimuli=40 televised antidrug ads) demonstrate the presence of non-reciprocal activation patterns and provide empirical evidence of the merit of utilizing the bivariate framework in health communication research and practice.

Authors

• Soyoon Kim, University of Miami

• Marco C. Yzer, U of Minnesota