Cognitive and Emotional Processes of Metaphoric Cancer Communications

描述（由申请人提供）：据估计，改变生活方式行为可以大大降低多种癌症的发病率。因此，健康传播者寻求创造信息，激励接受者采用和保持降低癌症风险的生活方式行为。相关研究表明，这些信息在改变人们对癌症的情绪和认知时尤其有效。具体而言，激励信息增加了接受者对癌症威胁其健康的情感担忧，也增强了他们对推荐的癌症预防行为有效降低癌症风险（反应效能）的认知，并在他们的能力范围内实施（自我效能）。尽管有这些重要的见解，但信息往往不足以改变生活方式行为。这种影响有限的一个潜在重要原因是，传播策略忽视了抽象性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程度较低；此外，人们往往对以抽象、不可观察的方式解决问题的行为的有效性缺乏信心。因此，制定沟通策略，指导设计具体的癌症信息代表了提高信息影响的低成本和潜在的强大手段。这个提议的项目提供了一个新的心理学研究的整合，表明隐喻是一种心理工具，可以帮助人们用更具体的术语来理解抽象的概念。将这一研究应用于癌症传播，可以得出这样的假设：使用隐喻将癌症风险与具体危害进行比较，将癌症预防行为与具体预防实践进行比较的信息，会引发一种令人振奋的癌症担忧水平，并加强疗效认知。这种关于隐喻诱发的情绪和认知如何相互影响行为的知识，提出了创造隐喻信息的新策略，这些隐喻信息将在激励降低癌症风险的行为方面发挥独特的作用。本项目通过五项程序性实验研究，考察隐喻性癌症信息对预防行为的激励作用。这五项研究都是为了阐明这种效应是如何被情感和认知过程的相互作用所驱动的。他们还研究了这些信息对谁特别有效，以及这些信息的具体特征决定了它们何时能激发预防行为。这些研究旨在了解隐喻信息在一系列癌症交流环境中的影响。他们测试了有关皮肤癌、肺癌和结肠癌的预测，并在现场和实验室环境中评估了短期和长期健康行为的改变。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的改变和有效的健康决策提供重要的基础，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.