Emotions in Health Narratives: Methods, Processes, and Interventions

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Narratives (stories) have rich potential to communicate with power, i.e., to persuade resistant or difficult to reach target audiences to change unhealthy habits and adopt health recommendations. At the same time, research in the past decades has revealed challenges in grasping the essence of a good narrative. Most notably, although it has become clear that emotions play a key role in the impact of narratives on health behaviors, the exact interaction between a story’s emotional potential, its affective outcomes and attitudinal/behavioral consequences is not yet mapped out. Stories often include a narrative arc (e.g., health problem, conflict, and resolution), which implies different emotional responses at different points throughout a story (e.g., fear and happiness). Such emotional variations pose challenges for researchers and practitioners; they are key to the power of a story but also difficult to capture. The objective of this panel is to discuss new findings, methods, and interventions that do justice to the role of emotions in health narratives.
The panel starts out by sharing findings from three experimental studies on the underlying role of emotion(s) in narrative persuasion. The first study manipulates mood states (positive, negative) and assesses transportation and persuasion following narrative versus rhetorical health messages. The second experimental study investigates discrete emotional reactions (fear, regret, anger, contentment, relief and optimism) to health prevention messages that vary in action-outcome frames (gain and loss) and experientiality. A third study examines (event congruent/incongruent) emotional responses while watching a short movie by means of facial expression analyses. Results across studies show event-congruent and appraisal-congruent effects of emotions and moods on transportation/engagement and attitude change.
The panel then goes on to discuss future directions; new methods and interventions. A fourth presentation proposes Media Psychophysiology as a paradigm for producing insights into embodied cognitive and emotional processes underlying narrative persuasion. This approach utilizes physiological indicators of real-time variation in attention and emotional responses evoked by narrative content in combination with self-report data to provide a holistic view of how specific features of narratives impact processes underlying persuasion. The final presentation focuses on narrative interventions on cyberbullying, a common phenomenon amongst early adolescents with important impact on mental health. It addresses the following questions: How can we elicit people’s stories about their cyberbullying experiences in innovative ways? Can we use these stories to construct realistic prototype scenarios (including information about events, participants, cognitions and emotions) designed for persuasive health communication?

Sub Unit

• Health Communication

Individual Presentations

• In the mood to be transported: Mood effects on transportation and persuasion for narrative and rhetorical health messages. - Enny Henrica Das, Radboud University Nijmegen

• Narrative insights into prevention behavior: The effect of experience-focussed narratives, outcomes frames and discrete emotions on preventive intentions - Anja Kalch, Augsburg University; Helena Bilandzic, Augsburg U

• The role of event-congruent emotions in narrative persuasion - Markus Appel, University of Koblenz-Landau; Constanze Schreiner, U of Koblenz-Landau; Maj-Britt Isberner, U of Kassel; Tobias Richter, U of Kassel

• New methods in narrative persuasion - Paul David Bolls, Texas Tech University

• Narrative methods in research and interventions on cyberbullying - Heidi Vandebosch, U of Antwerp - Department of Communication Studies