Emotional Flow in Vaccine Communication: Psychophysiological and Persuasive Responses to Preventive Health Messages

This study unfolds how embodied emotional processes vary across time and impact conscious attitudinal toward COVID-19-related policy when individuals experience narratives with different emotional features about vaccination for public health crisis prevention.

A media psychophysiology lab experiment was conducted in which college students (N = 86) were exposed to videos that varied in emotional flow. Psychophysiological indicators of arousal (skin conductance), cognitive resource allocation (heart rate), and negative emotional response (corrugator facial EMG) were recorded during exposure to stimulus videos, and self-report measures of attitudes were obtained after each video.

Emotional flow impacted the cognitive resources allocated to encoding and moment-by-moment arousal and emotional responses. Health messages with emotional flow features elicited a more skeptical emotional response, whereas those without emotional flow features led to stronger feelings of hope and more positive attitudes toward university public health prevention policy about vaccination.

Narrative vaccine campaigns with emotional flow increased psychophysiological engagement but did not improve persuasive outcomes in this experimental context because messages containing emotional shifts elicited greater skepticism and less favorable policy attitudes than consistently positive messages about the COVID-19 vaccine.