April 7-9, 2022 • Hyatt Regency • Lexington, KY
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Communication Strategies to Promote Comprehensive Well-being
Abstract: The Impact of Emotional Appeals and University Branding on Students’ Response to COVID-19 Messages
College campuses represent a unique battlefield for persuading young adults to adopt protective behaviors that help reduce the spread of Covid-19. Regardless of the policy response by a university, persuading students to adopt recommendations for reducing Covid-19 while maintaining positive attitudes towards the university is a goal for campus health communication efforts. The objective of this study is to provide insight into message design features that might effectively achieve this goal. This experiment uses psychophysiological methods to investigate how variation in two types of emotional appeals — hope related content and message framing (gain/loss) — and the presence of university branding impacts how students process and respond to Covid-19 messages. Theoretical Background: Hope is generally conceptualized as a discrete emotion characterized by a desire for a future positive outcome with an uncertain probability of happening (Chadwick, 2015). There is recent evidence that hope can be an effective persuasive tactic (Nabi & Myrick, 2019; Walter, Demetriades, & Nabi, 2021). Hope appears to have positive effects by reducing negative responses such as psychological reactance (Walter, Demetriades, & Nabi, 2021). Additionally, a large body of research has provided evidence of the persuasiveness of gain and loss framing of messages through eliciting respective positive and negative emotional responses (Nabi, et al., 2020). Variation in the placement of specific emotional content like hope and gain/loss framing within a message elicits emotional flow which is theorized to impact responses and persuasion (Nabi, 2015). University branding in alcohol advertising has been identified as a motivationally significant cue signaling the identification of a product/behavior with a valued social in-group (Bartholow et al., 2018). This research found that the presence of elements of a university logo in ads leads college students to perceive drinking as safer and encourages risky drinking behaviors. To date, no research has examined whether university branding elements can have positive persuasive effects in health messages. This experiment has the potential to advance health communication research by providing insight into the interactive effects of the above message features in the critical context of university messaging about Covid-19. Methodology The design of this experiment is a 2 (Hope Placement: beginning/end) X 2 (Message Framing: Gain/Loss) X 3 (Presence of University Branding: absent/moderate/strong) mixed factorial design. Hope Placement and University Branding are between subject factors. Message Framing is a withing subjects factor. Stimuli are videos written by the research team and produced by advanced broadcast students. Videos consist of a talent voicing copy looking into the camera. Participants (N = 250) will view two videos, a gain frame and a loss frame in randomized order. They will view a distractor video between the messages to control for carry over effects. Heart rate, skin conductance and facial EMG will be recorded during each message as indicators of cognitive/emotional processing. Participants will complete measures of message attitudes and behavioral intensions after each message. The experiment design will control for pre-existing attitudes and behaviors related to Covid-19. Data collection is ongoing. A full paper will be ready for the conference.