Examining Reactance to Visual and Verbal Features of Mask Promotion PSAs

Research on reactance to health promotion messages has focused almost exclusively on the freedom-threatening properties of language, with little attention paid to the visual elements of these messages. For instance, while health campaigns often feature images of people, researchers rarely systematically study whether the characteristics of these people influence perceived freedom threat and reactance. In this experiment, we tested the impact of both verbal and visual message features on U.S. adults' (N = 856) reactions to a public service announcement (PSA) about wearing a mask to slow the spread of COVID-19. We varied the forcefulness of the verbal appeal as well as the nonverbal gesture of the PSA models (i.e. hand raised in a "stop" gesture vs. in a neutral position). Compared to a courteous verbal appeal, a forceful verbal appeal produced lower masking intentions via psychological reactance. However, the forceful gesture was not perceived as freedom-threatening. Unexpectedly, demographic characteristics of the depicted models (gender and race) also influenced reactions to the PSAs. These findings raise important questions for future research on the effects of visual features of health promotion messages.