This study examined the impact of perceived stress on responses to messages that encouraged the performance of health promotion and disease detection behaviors. It was hypothesized that increases in perceived stress would be associated with decreased processing of messages encouraging disease detection behaviors, and that increases in perceived stress would not effect the processing of messages encouraging health promotion behaviors. To test these hypotheses participants completed a perceived stress measure and then read a message that encouraged the performance of either a health promotion or a disease detection behavior. Then the participants were asked to indicate their agreement with the message and to attempt to recall the message. The results indicated that participants experiencing higher levels of perceived stress spent less time reading and recalled less of the messages about detection behaviors than of the messages about promotion behaviors. When participants were experiencing lower levels of perceived stress these differences disappeared.
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Notes
Two participants failed to complete the procedures and were not included in any of the statistical analyses.
When gender was applied as variable to each of the analyses it was not involved in any significant effects.
Aiken and West (1991) suggest that differences between the groups be examined at one SD above and below the mean. Although the predicted interaction between Behavior Type and Stress Level was obtained, there were not significant differences between the detection behavior group and promotion behavior groups at one SD above the mean. Only when more extreme scores were used (scores that were 1.5 SD below the mean) did the difference between the detection group and promotion group at low levels of stress disappear.
The reading time data in this study, like most response time measures, was skewed with some trials being very slow. All analyses of reading time data reported in this paper have been subjected to a logarithmic transformation (see Kirk (1986) and Smith and Lerner (1986) for discussions of response latency transformations).
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Millar, M. The Effects of Perceived Stress on Reactions to Messages Designed to Increase Health Behaviors. J Behav Med 28, 425–432 (2005). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-005-9009-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10865-005-9009-4