Disgust in fear appeal anti-smoking advertisements: The effects on attitudes and abstinence motivation

General Discussion

In two studies, participants were exposed to anti-smoking commercials with varying levels of disgust and asked to indicate their attitudes towards smoking and their motivation to abstain from smoking. Overall, we found that there was not much to gain from higher levels of disgust in the present context when the level of fear was held constant. The fact that the level of fear was constant or controlled for is an important point, since the data indicate that disgust might be a way to make a message more fearful. In some cases one may be able to develop a strong emotional tone without the use of disgusting pictures, but in other cases disgust may be a convenient way of increasing the emotional impact of the message, which in turn may contribute to higher levels of perceived severity of a health consequence.

Based on the results of Leshner and colleagues (2009, 2010, 2011), we should have expected to find less persuasion when adding disgust to a fear-provoking message due attentional disengagement, and based on the studies by Morales et al. (2012) we should have expected to find more persuasion for the High Disgust condition. However, as described in the introduction, the methods and attitude objects of these two lines of research differ substantially from the present studies and might be the reason for the apparent disagreement between results.

One complicating factor when interpreting the current result is the fact that the Moderate Disgust group scored higher on the sadness ratings. Although the difference between the conditions was larger for the disgust ratings, the groups differed slightly in terms of sadness; and if sadness is a potent persuasive emotion, this could have undermined the potential effect of dis...

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...flect problems with the experimental set up, and not necessarily represent how the ads would be received in the real world. However, the present study contributes to the cumulative knowledge about the effects of disgust in different contexts, and gives a different picture than the studies that reported detrimental or beneficial effects of disgust on attention and persuasion. Keeping the limitations of the study in mind, the results indicate that there is little to gain or lose from including disgusting elements instead of equally fearful non-disgusting elements in the present context of anti-smoking message exposure. However, in large-scale campaigns, even miniscule effects may be of importance. The 95% confidence intervals for the effect sizes obtained in the present studies included levels that might have practical implications if large populations were targeted.