Illness- Or Death-related Messages Motivate Exercise

Health News– Recent study found that fitness apps that emphasize illness and death-related messaging tend to be more effective in motivating exercise than messaging focused on obesity, social stigma, or financial cost messaging.

In a new study, researchers at the University of Waterloo asked 669 participants to specify how effective these five types of messages (illness, death, obesity, social stigma, financial cost) were in terms of inspiring them to exercise at home with a fitness app, to uncover their benefits and connection with social-cognitive beliefs, including self-efficacy, self-regulation, outcome expectations, and observing which role male/female gender played.

The study findings showed that these types of messages were not only motivational but also had a significant association with self-regulatory belief and outcome expectation, but no difference was found between males and females.

“This study is important because it helps us — especially designers of health apps — understand the types of messages that individuals, regardless of gender, are likely to be motivated by in persuasive health communication, and that is likely to influence individuals’ social-cognitive beliefs about exercise,” said Kiemute Oyibo, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Waterloo’s School of Public Health Sciences.

Oyibo later mentioned that he had expected the obesity-related to be inspirational and have a prominent relationship with self-regulatory beliefs as obesity is one of the leading causes of global mortality. According to him, future studies regarding this research should also consider other demographic characteristics apart from genders, such as culture, race, age, and education to discover the role they play in effective health communication.

To Know More You May Refer To:

Oyibo, K. (2021). The relationship between perceived health message motivation and social cognitive beliefs in persuasive health communication. Information, 12(9), 350. https://doi.org/10.3390/info12090350