Healthy by Choice? How health control beliefs shape emotions, attitudes, and behaviors

• In Event: Health, Well-being, and Emotions

Abstract

Many contemporary Westerners believe that they can control their health through lifestyle modification, proactive screenings, and preventive care. Public health researchers and critical scholars have produced opposing predictions about how these health control beliefs affect people’s emotions, attitudes, and behaviors. Is health control an empowering discourse that reduces anxiety and inspires healthy habits, or an oppressive regime of self-governance that fuels guilt, stigma, and overuse of medical care? Drawing on an original survey of 2,084 middle-aged Americans, this study shows that health control beliefs are a double-edged sword. People who believe they can control their health experience less health anxiety, but more health-related guilt. They are more supportive of publicly-funded healthcare, but they endorse more health stigma and are less supportive of disability payments. Finally, they maintain healthier diets and exercise more, but they are also more susceptible to unnecessary health screenings and more skeptical of vaccine science. These new data reveal that while the contemporary regime of health control has modest positive effects, these benefits cannot be separated from a risky mix of guilt, stigma, overtreatment, and skepticism of expertise.

Authors

• Rachel Kahn Best, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Zoe Virginia Chanin, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor