DDRIG in DRMS: Exploring how anxious people seek and process information about environmental and health risks

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Carefully conceived and crafted risk communication messages can convey risk information to help people make decisions that may ultimately protect them from health and environmental risks. When people receive information about risks, they often feel anxious and do not seek or retain information like other people, making it hard to make good decisions. It is critical to understand how anxiety affects both people’s information processing and management to design better risk communication messages. This project applies the risk perception attitude framework to two experiments to examine how anxious people process and manage risk information regarding two issues: Type 2 diabetes and climate change. This project combines self-report measures of processing and response with eye-tracking (to measure attention to information) and physiological measures of anxiety. The findings of this project are important because they will contribute to our understanding of how to design risk communication messages by identifying the ways in which people use risk information in decisions when they feel anxious. The Risk Perception Attitude framework is a risk communication model that predicts how audiences, segmented by perceived risk and efficacy beliefs, will seek out risk information and the emotions they will experience. The framework predicts that those with high risk perception but weak efficacy beliefs are likely to avoid information and will experience high anxiety (termed the anxious segment). Gaps in knowledge exist about how people who fall into the anxious segment respond to risk information, seek, and process information about risks. This research examines: (1) how risk perception and efficacy beliefs affect information processing and management behaviors processing via anxiety, (2) the type of efficacy information best processed by people in the anxious segment, and (3) how anxious people process information when their efficacy beliefs are enhanced. This research involve two studies: an online experiment testing the Risk Perception Attitude framework with a nationally representative sample, and a laboratory experiment with only anxious people to further investigate how they process information. The study combines eye-tracking data and self-report to examine risk message attention and processing. This project informs risk communication efforts for health and environmental risks by focusing on the role of anxiety, an emotion people often experience when they are exposed to risk information. Understanding how anxious individuals process information can contribute to improving risk communications for a significant population.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.