TY - JOUR
T1 - A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Guilt on Health-Related Attitudes and Intentions
AU - Xu, Zhan
AU - Guo, Hao
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© 2017 Taylor & Francis Group, LLC.
PY - 2018/5/4
Y1 - 2018/5/4
N2 - Guilt appeals are successful in encouraging healthy behaviors as proved by many studies. However, there has been no previous systematic review of guilt research in health domain. Thus, a meta-analysis of eight studies (2,061 subjects) was conducted to examine the effectiveness of guilt on health-related attitudes and intentions. The result revealed a strong positive overall effect of guilt (r =.49, 95% CI 0.31–0.64) despite the heterogeneity. Guilt had a stronger power in changing attitudes/intentions when paired with text-only messages than text-picture mixed messages. For studies using a college sample, the percentage of females marginally moderated the effect of guilt. Whether a message was self focused or other focused did not significantly moderate the effect of guilt. Future directions and practical implications are provided.
AB - Guilt appeals are successful in encouraging healthy behaviors as proved by many studies. However, there has been no previous systematic review of guilt research in health domain. Thus, a meta-analysis of eight studies (2,061 subjects) was conducted to examine the effectiveness of guilt on health-related attitudes and intentions. The result revealed a strong positive overall effect of guilt (r =.49, 95% CI 0.31–0.64) despite the heterogeneity. Guilt had a stronger power in changing attitudes/intentions when paired with text-only messages than text-picture mixed messages. For studies using a college sample, the percentage of females marginally moderated the effect of guilt. Whether a message was self focused or other focused did not significantly moderate the effect of guilt. Future directions and practical implications are provided.
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U2 - 10.1080/10410236.2017.1278633
DO - 10.1080/10410236.2017.1278633
M3 - Article
C2 - 28278614
AN - SCOPUS:85011923685
SN - 1041-0236
VL - 33
SP - 519
EP - 525
JO - Health Communication
JF - Health Communication
IS - 5
ER -