DEFENSIVE PROCESSING OF PERSONALLY RELEVANT HEALTH MESSAGES

Subjects for whom a health threat was relevant or irrelevant were recruited and matched on prior beliefs in the health threat. Following exposure to either a low- or a high-threat message, high-relevance subjects were less likely to believe in the threat. Consistent with earlier work, no evidence was found to suggest that defensive inattention to the messages mediated subjects' final beliefs. Instead, processing measures suggested that high-relevance subjects processed threatening parts of both messages in a biased fashion. The relationship between biased judgment and biased processing is discussed, as are the difficulties in documenting the latter