Explaining Boomerang Effects in Persuasive Health Communication: How Psychological Reactance to Healthy Eating Messages Elevates Attention to Unhealthy Food.

While psychological reactance is often invoked to explain the unintended boomerang effects of persuasive health messages, underlying processes that might explain how reactance affects behavior are rarely studied. We investigated whether messages that elicit reactance can bias attention by increasing the perception of information that potentially facilitates adverse behavior. Participants (N = 998) were assigned to one of three experimental conditions: reading an aggressive and emotional text asking them to stop eating meat (appeal condition); reading a neutral text about the nativeness and benefits of eating less meat (information condition); or completing an unrelated word count task (control condition). After assessing their reactance, participants were asked to identify as many words as possible in a word grid in which some words related to meat. Compared to the other conditions, the appeal condition elicited the greatest reactance. Furthermore, omnivore participants in this condition identified significantly more meat-related words when they reported higher levels of reactance. By showing that psychological reactance elicited by forceful health appeals increases attention to information that may facilitate the admonished behaviors, our findings contribute to an improved understanding of effective health communication.

Attending to emotional faces in the flanker task: Probably much less automatic than previously assumed.

Attention to emotional faces was tested in a series of 5 experiments using the flanker paradigm. Distraction and compatibility effects that were stronger for emotional compared to neutral faces were found in only one of the studies. No reliable differences were found between faces displaying different emotions. The data suggest that attentional capture of emotional faces depends on emotion being a task relevant feature, indicating that attention has to be intentionally allocated to emotional information for those effects to materialize. Our findings also indicate that attending to emotions due to task requirements is not a sufficient condition for an attentional bias towards emotional faces. Even within emotion classification tasks, we only found reliable attentional prioritizing of emotional faces when the position of the target stimulus varied across trials and had to be identified on the basis of an additional feature, thus rendering the processing of the flanker stimuli obligatory in the task. In sum, these findings indicate that automatic attentional capture by emotional faces is a highly conditional phenomenon. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2020 APA, all rights reserved).