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Undoing the Effects of Seizing and Freezing: Decreasing Defensive Processing of Personally Relevant Messages
Author(s) -
Block Lauren G.,
Williams Patti
Publication year - 2002
Publication title -
journal of applied social psychology
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.822
H-Index - 111
eISSN - 1559-1816
pISSN - 0021-9029
DOI - 10.1111/j.1559-1816.2002.tb00243.x
Subject(s) - persuasion , psychology , elaboration , undoing , social psychology , relevance (law) , elaboration likelihood model , persuasive communication , advertising , psychotherapist , business , political science , philosophy , humanities , law
Health messages are directed at those who are at risk of incurring adverse consequences. However, previous experiments have found that people process personally relevant health messages in a biased, defensive manner. We examine the role of elaboration as a mechanism to encourage less biased processing of personally relevant health appeals. Results demonstrate that high‐relevance consumers freeze on the threatening information, leading to lower change appraisal (perceived severity, self‐efficacy, and response efficacy) and decreased message persuasion. For these individuals, renewed elaboration on the consequences of caffeine (Experiment 1) and olestra (Experiment 2) consumption reduces defensive processing. This elaboration “unfreezes” message processing, leading to greater change appraisal and increased persuasion. These experiments provide guidelines for practitioners to design more effective messages.