The Role of Emotions in Preventative Health Communication [Hardcover]

Jessica Gall Myrick takes us on a useful tour of various emotions and deftly applies available research to understanding how people engage health-related messages. As a researcher herself, she is sensitive to the limitations of studies in this area and provides a broad overview that should be relevant for practitioners and researchers interested in preventative health behavior.Research on emotion will be at the center of health communication scholarship for decades to come. This volume provides researchers with a lucid overview of the topic. It masterfully synthesizes past scholarship and outlines fascinating pathways for future research.The Role of Emotions in Preventative Health Communication examines how discrete emotions evoked by preventative health media messages influence audience response. After introducing a theoretical foundation for emotions and health-related media effects research, Myrick identifies nine emotionsfear, guilt, anger, sadness, humor, pride, interest, hope, and elevationand discusses the roles these emotions play in health campaigns, health journalism, health information seeking, and eHealth.Health-related media permeate our modern experience, from using an online search engine to reading a pamphlet about vaccinations at the doctors office or watching a television news report on the dangers of sitting too much. This book makes the argument that if prevention-focused health messages are to motivate behavior change, they must tug at the heartstrings, and researchers need to understand more precisely how different emotional reactions influence health message effects. In making this case, this book takes a quantitative, social science-based approach to understanding the role of emotions in shaping individual-level effects to preventative health messages disseminated through mass media channels. The book focuses on how discrete emotions evoked by preventative health media messages influence how audiences respond to those messages. Are they pelÃ'