Show Me a Photo of the Character: Exploring the Interaction between Text and Visuals in Narrative Persuasion

The use of narrative text in health messaging has been ubiquitous. With the popularity of promoting public health on social media, it becomes critical to investigate what visual images should be used to maximize the impact of narrative health-related posts. This study focused on messages designed to communicate the breast cancer risk associated with alcohol use. We conducted a 2 (text: narrative vs. non-narrative) x 2 (visuals: exemplar vs. non-exemplar) between-subjects online experiment (N = 299). Our results showed that narrative (vs. non-narrative) text led to greater attention, stronger negative emotions, and higher intentions to seek information about alcohol use and cancer among female drinkers. The visual exemplar (vs. non-exemplar) also produced higher intentions to seek information and reduce alcohol use. More importantly, including a visual exemplar (vs. non-exemplar) significantly increased negative emotions and subsequently behavioral intentions when the text was a narrative, but the visual content did not make a difference when the text was a non-narrative. The results of this study show the importance of adding a relevant visual exemplar to narrative text, such as a photo of the character, to improve message effectiveness.