Tailored visuals, implementation interventions, and sun safe behavior: A longitudinal message experiment

One way to communicate skin cancer risk is through ultraviolet (UV) photographs, which can depict the target person (tailored visual) or someone else (stock visual). There is a need for more longitudinal research examining the relative impact of tailored UV photographs compared with other message interventions that could increase sun safe behaviors.

Students 14-18 years of age (N = 654) at eleven high schools in Utah were recruited to participate in a longitudinal experiment (assessments: pretest, posttest, 1 month follow-up) comparing the relative persuasive impact of receiving either (a) stock and tailored UV photographs or (b) stock UV photographs and an implementation intervention on outdoor tanning behavior. Participants completed measures of fear, appearance norms and benefits, threat susceptibility/severity, self-efficacy, response efficacy, freedom threat, reactance, and outdoor tanning behavior.

Compared with the implementation intervention, participants in the tailored UV condition reported increased fear and freedom threat and decreased appearance norms and benefits of tanning immediately following exposure to the intervention and decreased outdoor tanning 1 month after the intervention. Indirect effects also emerged with tailored UV exposure decreasing outdoor tanning via appearance benefits and increasing outdoor tanning when immediate fear triggered psychological reactance.

The results contribute to research on lay reactions to tailored visuals, implementation interventions, and theorizing the indirect effects of affect and cognition across time. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2023 APA, all rights reserved).