The Influence of Self-Regulatory Focus in the Effectiveness of Emotional Health Campaigns - It Is a Matter of Context Too

We examined the usefulness of regulatory relevancy for health advertisements by matching their emotional tone to recipients’ self-regulatory focus and showed that a match versus a mismatch is more persuasive, and this equally for both foci despite assumed differences in their reliance on affect. However, in another experiment, we discovered that the context moderates these emotion-congruence effects. Stronger effects emerged when promotion people considered affect to be highly versus little relevant, due to a stronger activated focus. Since prevention people rely less on affect, equivocal results were expected here. Indeed, effects of emotional stimuli only emerged in more divergent contexts.

Citation:

Leen Adams, Tineke Faseur, and Maggie Geuens (2009) ,"The Influence of Self-Regulatory Focus in the Effectiveness of Emotional Health Campaigns - It Is a Matter of Context Too", in NA - Advances in Consumer Research Volume 36, eds. Ann L. McGill and Sharon Shavitt, Duluth, MN : Association for Consumer Research, Pages: 662-663.