Defensive Processing of Personally Relevant Health Messages

TLDR

Participants were recruited based on the relevance of a health threat and matched on prior beliefs. High‑relevance participants reduced threat belief after exposure, with no mediation by defensive inattention, but instead showed biased processing of threatening content. The study discusses the link between biased judgment and processing, noting challenges in documenting the latter.

Abstract

Subectsfor whom a health threat was relvant or irrelevant were recruited and matched on prior beliefs in the health threat. Following exposure to either a low- or a high-threat message, high-relvance subjects were less likely to believe in the threat. Consistent with earlier work, no evidence was found to suggest that defensive inattention to the messages mediated subjects' final beliefs. Instead, processing measures suggested that highrelevance subects processed threatening parts of both messages in a biased fashion. The relationship between biased judgment and biased processing is discussed, as are the difficulties in documenting the latter