Effect of extraneous affect on health message reception

Abstract

People often avoid paying attention to health messages. One reason is that health messages can evoke negative affect, which produces avoidance. Prior efforts to reduce disengagement focused on changing message content or buffering the self from threat, producing mixed effects. The present studies test whether inducing positively valenced, low-arousal affect independently of the message or the self, labeled extraneous affect, promotes health message receptivity. Across four studies (total n = 1,447), participants who briefly meditated (versus a control listening task) paid more attention to messages (Study 1). Increased positive valence facilitated attention, which subsequently increased message comprehension (Studies 2-4), whereas reduced arousal directly increased message comprehension. These effects generalized across extraneous affect manipulations, settings, information domains, and levels of message threat. Taken together, extraneous affect can be leveraged to promote message receptivity. This contributes to a theoretical understanding of how affect impacts persuasion.