Emotional responses to prosocial messages increase willingness to self-isolate during the COVID-19 pandemic

Abstract

<p>The COVID-19 pandemic may be one of the greatest modern societal challenges that requires widespread collective action and cooperation. While a handful of actions can help reduce pathogen transmission, one critical behavior is to self-isolate. Public health messages often use persuasive language to change attitudes and behaviors, which can evoke a wide range of negative and positive emotional responses. In a U.S. representative sample (N = 955), we presented two messages that leveraged either threatening or prosocial persuasive language, and measured self-reported emotional reactions and willingness to self-isolate. Although emotional responses to the interventions were highly heterogeneous, personality traits known to be linked with distinct emotional experiences (extraversion and neuroticism) explained significant variance in the arousal response. While results show that both types of appeals increased willingness to self-isolate (Cohen’s d = .41), compared to the threat message, the efficacy of the prosocial message was more dependent on the magnitude of the evoked emotional response on both arousal and valence dimensions. Together, these results imply that prosocial appeals have the potential to be associated with greater compliance if they evoke highly positive emotional responses.</p>

Barriers and facilitators of adherence to social distancing recommendations during COVID-19 among a large international sample of adults

“…health communications about social distancing should incorporate more nuanced guidelines for safely engaging socially with others, while also maintaining appropriate physical distancing standards, using non-blaming and non-stigmatizing language and targeting specific groups such as men and younger individuals. In line with our findings that wanting to protect self, others and the community were the strongest motivators associated with higher adherence to social distancing recommendations, it is important that these compassionate-focused and prosocial attitudes are kept at the center of future public health campaigns about social distancing [20][21][22]. Lastly, the study found that seeing many people walking in the streets was one of the strongest barriers against social distancing (i.e., associated with lower adherence), but seeing few people in the streets acted as a facilitator of adherence to social distancing (statistic not reported).…”

Anxiety as a mediator of relationships between perceptions of the threat of COVID-19 and coping behaviors during the onset of the pandemic in Poland

“…Nevertheless, positive emotions can also play important roles. For example, Heffner et al [ 34 ] found that emotionally positive messages (prosocial messages) can increase the likelihood that people self-isolate. In addition, we focused on the roles played by affect and emotion.…”

Warning ‘Don't spread’ versus ‘Don't be a spreader’ to prevent the COVID-19 pandemic

“…The virtue of manipulating the wording of instructions lies in its simplicity and general versatility. In addition to highlighting self-identity, a recent paper reported that manipulating the expressions of messages to appeal to citizens' emotions is effective in promoting behaviour to self-isolate [2]. However, it is important to find more useful methods, given the circumstances in different countries such as cultural, linguistic and legal differences.…”

“…As mentioned in the Participants section, we excluded the participants whose answers for the questions about native language and nationality are not Japanese and Japan, respectively. 2 Figure 1. The timeline of the survey schedule for sending the form for the second wave.…”