Types of anticipated affect that encourage and discourage vaccination: a scoping review protocol

Various cognitive behavioural models and theories have been used to address vaccine hesitancy. However, those models and theories have been criticised for focusing on cognitive influences on health behaviours at the expense of affective influences. Recent studies have highlighted the importance of affective elements as complementary predictors of health behaviours. Anticipated affect (ie, an expectation of one's affective response to the target behaviour) has received the most scrutiny. This scoping review will analyse studies of anticipated affect that aimed to encourage vaccination and organise implications for future research and practice in vaccine communication. Our report will focus on exploring the usefulness of affective influence in terms of a comparison with the cognitive influence on vaccination.

We will search several databases (MEDLINE, CINAHL, PsycINFO, PsycARTICLES, Academic Search Complete, Embase, Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar) and identify additional literature by searching the reference lists of eligible studies. Eligible studies are those that quantitatively or qualitatively examined anticipated affect and aimed to encourage vaccination. Only papers written in English will be included. We will include all eligible publications from database inception up to the date of the final database search. Two independent reviewers will screen the titles, abstracts and full texts of all identified studies. Two independent reviewers will share responsibility for data extraction and verification. Discrepancies will be resolved through discussion to reach consensus. We will extract data such as study characteristics, type of vaccine, type of anticipated affect, participant characteristics, methodology and main results. Data will be extracted using a customised extraction template on Covidence. The findings will be synthesised in a descriptive, narrative review.

This work does not warrant any ethical or safety review. This scoping review will be presented at a relevant conference and published in a peer-reviewed journal.