Emotive health advertising and message resistance

Health-promotion advertising campaigns often induce high levels of negative affect to stimulate self-regulation of unhealthy behaviours. Although the use of negative emotion may increase the salience and accessibility of campaign messages, there is also a risk that it may induce resistance toward those messages. This paper describes four specific forms of resistance: repression, defensive processing, downward comparison, and reactance. Each may be triggered by emotive stimuli, and each can impair aspects of message reception or processing. Thus, negative emotion may inhibit the likelihood of self-change rather than enhance it. Recommendations for the conduct of advertising campaigns and future research are made.