Cognitive and Emotional Processes of Metaphoric Cancer Communications

描述(由申请人提供)：据估计，改变生活方式可以显著降低多种癌症的发病率。因此，健康传播者试图创建信息，激励接受者采用并保持降低癌症风险的生活方式行为。相关研究表明，当这些信息改变人们对癌症的情绪和认知时，它们尤其有效。具体地说，激励性的信息增加了接受者对癌症威胁他们健康的情绪担忧，也加强了他们对推荐的癌症预防行为有效降低癌症风险(反应效率)并在他们的能力范围内实施(自我效能)的认识。尽管有这些关键的见解，但信息往往无法改变生活方式的行为。造成这种有限影响的一个潜在重要原因是，传播策略忽视了抽象在公众对癌症的理解中的作用。研究表明，抽象的、远程的威胁引发的担忧较少；此外，人们往往对以抽象的、不可观察的方式解决问题的行为的有效性缺乏信心。因此，开发指导将癌症信息具体化的设计的传播策略是增强信息影响力的一种低成本和潜在的强大手段。这项拟议的项目提供了一种新的整合，心理学中不断增长的研究表明，隐喻是一种心理工具，帮助人们用更具体的术语来理解抽象的概念。将这项研究应用到癌症交流中，得出了一个假设，即使用隐喻来比较癌症风险和具体危险，并将癌症预防行为与具体的预防实践进行比较，将引发更多的癌症担忧，并加强疗效认知。这种关于隐喻诱导的情绪和认知如何交互影响行为的知识为创造隐喻信息提供了新的策略，这些策略将在激励降低癌症风险的行为方面独一无二地有效。这项拟议的项目在五个程序性的实验研究中检验了隐喻癌症信息对预防行为的激励作用。所有五项研究都旨在阐明这种影响是如何由相互作用的情感和认知过程驱动的。他们还检查了这些信息对谁特别有效，以及决定它们何时激励预防行为的信息的具体特征。这些研究旨在告知隐喻信息在一系列癌症交流环境中的影响。他们测试对皮肤癌、肺癌和结肠癌的预测，并在现场和实验室环境中评估短期和长期的健康行为变化。如果该项目的目标得以实现，这项研究将为理解如何促进健康行为改变和富有成效的健康决策提供关键基础，从而显著减少癌症的诊断和进展。

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): Changing lifestyle behaviors has been estimated to substantially reduce the incidence of many types of cancer. Health communicators have therefore sought to create messages that motivate recipients to adopt and maintain lifestyle behaviors that reduce cancer risk. Associated research reveals that such messages are especially effective when they change both emotions and cognitions about cancer. Specifically, motivating messages increase recipients' emotional worry that cancer threatens their well-being, and also strengthen their cognitions that a recommended cancer-prevention behavior is effective at reducing cancer risk (response efficacy) and lies within their power to implement (self-efficacy). Despite these critical insights, messages often fall short of their potential to change lifestyle behaviors. One potentially important reason for this limited impact is that communication strategies overlook the role of abstractness in the public's understanding of cancer. Research shows that abstract, remote threats elicit low worry; also, people tend to lack confidence in the efficacy of behaviors that solve problems in abstract, unobservable ways. Therefore, developing communication strategies that guide the design of concretizing cancer messages represents a low-cost and potentially powerful means for enhancing message impact. The proposed project offers a novel integration of growing research in psychology showing that metaphor is a mental tool that helps people to grasp abstract ideas in terms that are more concrete. Applying this research to cancer communication leads to the hypothesis that messages that use metaphor to compare cancer risks to concrete hazards, and to compare cancer prevention behaviors to concrete prevention practices, will elicit an energizing level of cancer worry and strengthen efficacy cognitions. This knowledge of how metaphor-induced emotions and cognitions interactively influence behavior suggests new strategies for creating metaphoric messages that will be uniquely effective at motivating behaviors that reduce cancer risk. The proposed project examines the motivating effect of metaphoric cancer messages on prevention behaviors in five programmatic experimental studies. All five studies are designed to illuminate how this effect is driven by interacting emotional and cognitive processes. They also examine for whom such messages will be particularly effective and the specific features of the messages that determine when they motivate prevention behavior. The studies are designed to inform the impact of metaphoric messages across a range of cancer communication contexts. They test predictions with regard to skin, lung, and colon cancer, and they assess both short- and longer-term health behavior change in both field and laboratory settings. If the project aims are achieved, this research will provide a critical foundation for understanding how to foster health behavior change and productive health decision making that can markedly reduce cancer diagnosis and progression.