How health information affects college students’ inclination toward variety-seeking tendency

Abstract

College students often consume too much snacks (e.g. potato chips) and such high-fat snacks are found to be related to obesity. This paper seeks to explore the effect of health-related information on the relationship of mood states and variety seeking (VS) behavior among enjoyable snacks. Health warnings and nutritional labeling are used to examine the moderating effects on this relationship. Consistent with our hypotheses, the results indicate that the presence of health warnings attenuates the influence of mood states on VS, so that happy and sad students tend to converge to similar levels of VS. However, in the absence of health warnings, sad students tend to incorporate significantly more VS than happy students. Similarly, the presence of nutritional labeling attenuates the influence of mood states on VS, so that happy and sad students tend to converge to similar levels of VS. However, in the absence of nutritional labeling, sad students tend to incorporate significantly more VS than happy students. The results provide evidence that making health warnings and nutritional labeling more salient might be a good way to decrease students' VS tendency for high-fat snacks.

Canadian clinical practice guidelines for the management of anxiety, posttraumatic stress and obsessive-compulsive disorders

“…Additional specific psychological approaches that have demonstrated efficacy in treating anxiety in children and adolescents include: attention bias modification (ABM) [1226], MBCT [1195], and social effectiveness therapy (SET) [1227,1228] for SAD; ERP [1229,1230], family-based CBT [1231,1232], and meta-cognitive therapy [1229] for OCD; cognitive behavioral writing therapy (CBWT) [1233], spiritual-hypnosis assisted therapy (SHAT) [1234], emotion regulation therapy [1235], exposure therapy [1236], and EMDR [905,1237,1238] for PTSD; and exposure therapy for specific phobias [313]. …”

Variety-Seeking Behavior in Consumption: A Literature Review and Future Research Directions

“…For example, a study with 124 subjects demonstrated that people are likely to include more variety in their consumption decisions when they are induced to a negative emotion than a positive emotion ( Chuang et al, 2008 ). Moreover, a series of research discussed the effect of two specific emotional states (sadness and happiness) on variety-seeking behaviors and found similar conclusions ( Lin and Lin, 2009 ; Chien-Huang and Hung-Chou, 2010 , 2012 ; Lin et al, 2011 ; Lin, 2014 ). These studies used choice task scenarios and revealed that participants with a sad mood selected more variety than those with a happy mood.…”

“…Then, researchers discussed how specific emotions and physical conditions, including positive and negative emotions ( Chuang et al, 2008 ), sadness and happiness ( Lin and Lin, 2009 ; Chien-Huang and Hung-Chou, 2010 , 2012 ; Lin et al, 2011 ; Lin, 2014 ), local optimism and pessimism ( Yang and Urminsky, 2015 ), and winning-losing perception ( Chang et al, 2021 ), affect consumers’ decision-making behaviors when faced with multiple choices. In these moods and states, seeking variety helps people change their current status.…”

“…Different emotional states bring different stimulation levels to consumers. Based on the Mood evaluation framework , compared with positive emotions (such as happiness), negative emotions (such as sadness) bring low satisfaction to consumers; therefore, consumers experiencing negative emotions increase their satisfaction through variety-seeking behaviors ( Roehm and Roehm, 2004 ; Lin and Lin, 2009 ; Chien-Huang and Hung-Chou, 2010 , 2012 ; Lin et al, 2011 ; Lin, 2014 ). Building on Processing style theory , mortality salience increases variety-seeking behaviors in consumption by influencing an individual’s global processing style ( Huang and Wyer, 2015 ).…”