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Executive Summary
Hepatitis C affects approximately four million Americans and is associated with 8000 –10,000 deaths per year in the United States alone. Creating heightened awareness of the dangers of hepatitis C—(and how to avoid getting it) is considered a major public health challenge. How can health officials, both in the public and private sector, ensure that their messages of prevention get heard?

A set of four studies suggest that there are two aspects to successful health communication. First, the emotional state of a person is a critical aspect of whether he or she is receptive to a particular health message. People with a positive state of mind find it easier to cope with messages that detail health risks. Second, health messages fall into two categories: those that focus on the consequences of an illness for an individual and those that emphasize the impact of illness on "close others," such as family or friends. How attuned a person is to the particular type of message (either self- or other-focused) can greatly influence the effectiveness of that message.

Consider an advertisement for the Breast Cancer Research Foundation that depicts a picture of a spouse and two children and states, "Breast cancer doesn't just affect women." This advertisement, which is typical of many public service messages issued by government agencies and commercial corporations, focuses on the family and asks the reader to think about the consequences of illness on others. In contrast, a recent hepatitis advertisement focused on the self: "Five million Americans have hepatitis. Do you?"

Whether these messages work depends on the person’s emotional state of mind. The authors find that when people are feeling a certain emotion when reading the advertisement, the compatibility between that particular emotion and the referent group in the message (self versus family) dramatically varies the impact and processing of the health message.

Self-/other-relatedness refers to the degree to which specific emotions focus on a self that is disengaged from others versus a self that is intimately intertwined with others. Self-focused emotions, such as pride, happiness, frustration, and anger, tend to be associated with heightened awareness of a person’s internal state, such as his or her own needs, goals, and desires, to the exclusion of others. In contrast, other-focused emotions, such as empathy, peacefulness, indebtedness, and shame, tend to be associated with heightened awareness of the internal state of close others (i.e., family and friends) and thus involve perspective taking (e.g., what is a close other thinking, how are they feeling). People who are asked to think only about themselves to the exclusion of others are more likely to feel emotions such as happiness and sadness, whereas those asked to think about themselves in the context of family and friends are more likely to experience emotions such as peacefulness and agitation.

In addition to this "self–other" component, the emotional state of the targeted person must be considered. In the series of experiments, the researchers find that when people are primed with positive emotions, such as happiness and peacefulness, they are much more receptive to health warnings than when they are asked to recount situations in which they felt sad or anxious.

More specific, health messages are the most likely to be heard and absorbed when there is self–other compatibility, such that the emotion being felt and the emotion being experienced are positive. Conversely, when the person’s mood is negative (sad or anxious), such health warnings drop dramatically in terms of effectiveness in conditions of compatibility. Furthermore, the data show that people who are in a positive emotional state are more persuaded by a health message with a compatible appeal because they have the resources to process the appeal and because the appeal is relevant and personal.

There are many implications from this study. Among other things, the findings suggest that messages that make risk "too real" by increasing a person’s perceived vulnerability to a disease might be effective under some conditions but could also backfire. In other words, although positive emotions might make amplified health risk acceptable, negative emotions can lead to rejection of a health message viewed as "bad news," particularly in conditions in which the message is considered highly relevant and personal.

That people are more likely to process emotionally aversive information when they are in a positive mood implies that a health message may be more effective if it is aired in the context of a situational comedy than in the context of a crime or hospital drama. Relatedly, if the content of the health message is compatible with the content of the television show (i.e., an other-oriented message shown in conjunction with a family show, such as Everybody Loves Raymond), the message is likely to be even more effective.

In general, the prospect that the vulnerability of close others may lead to favorable health behaviors is compelling and opens novel avenues for further research. The authors discuss implications for improving health through marketing communications and the role of emotions in making health decisions.

Biography
Nidhi Agrawal is Assistant Professor of Marketing and Donald P. Jacobs Scholar in Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Professor Agrawal’s research interests are related to understanding consumer psychology with a focus on how consumers may be driven by different goals, different ways of construing events, and different emotional responses. She applies this knowledge of consumer psychology to designing effective marketing communications and public health messages. Her research has appeared in leading academic journals, such as Journal of Consumer Psychology and Journal of Consumer Research.

Geeta Menon is Professor of Marketing and Harold MacDowell Faculty Fellow in the Leonard N. Stern School of Business at New York University. She is also Chair of the Marketing Department. She received her PhD in Business Administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign. Professor Menon’s research interests include the study of consumer memory and information processing in the contexts of survey methodology, advertising of health information, and risk perception. She serves on the editorial review boards of Journal of Consumer Psychology, Journal of Consumer Research, Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Public Policy & Marketing and also serves on the policy board of Journal of Consumer Research. She was the cochair of the 2004 Association for Consumer Research conference and is currently the treasurer of Association for Consumer Research.

Jennifer L. Aaker is General Atlantic Professor of Marketing in the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University. Professor Aaker received her BA in Psychology from University of California at Berkeley and her PhD in Marketing from Stanford University. Professor Aaker’s area of expertise lies in consumer psychology, focusing on how people across distinct cultural contexts feel, think, and experience events in different (and sometimes similar) ways. She also focuses on understanding emotions and the psychology of consumer–brand relationships. Her research has been published in marketing and psychology journals, she has been honored with a number of awards, and she sits on the editorial review boards of Journal of Consumer Research (associate editor), Journal of Marketing Research, and Journal of Consumer Psychology.

Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. XLIV, No. 1, February 2007
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