Message Framing for Health: Moderation by Perceived Susceptibility and Motivational Orientation in a Diverse Sample of Americans

Health behavior interventions often seek to educate people about the consequences of a health behavior. Information about consequences can be framed as either gains or losses. Gain-framed messages emphasize the benefits of adherence, such as “Flossing daily can lower your risk for periodontitis.” Loss-framed messages, on the other hand, emphasize the costs of nonadherence such as “Not flossing daily can increase your risk for periodontitis.” Although no overall advantage of gain- versus loss-framed messages exists in many domains of health behavior including oral health (for meta-analysis, see Gallagher & Updegraff, 2012), the relative effectiveness of gain- and loss-framed health messages depends on characteristics of the message recipient. In this study, conducted over 6 months among a large, age and ethnically diverse sample of Americans, we examine two classes of psychological characteristics—the motivational orientation of the message recipient and beliefs about one’s health risk—that have each received considerable support as moderators of successful message framing (Rothman & Updegraff, 2010).