Studie zeigt, dass Gesundheitswarnungen, die Mitgefühl hervorrufen, Menschen wirksamer davon überzeugen können, schädliche Verhaltensweisen zu ändern

>The study, funded by a grant from the National Cancer Institute of the National Institutes of Health, surveyed two sample groups, an online panel of moderate to heavy drinkers aged 21 to 84 and UConn undergraduates between 21 and 28 years old.
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>Participants were randomly shown either three narrative or three nonnarrative pictorial warning labels communicating oral, esophageal, and larynx cancers, then asked various questions about them, including how moved they were and whether they’d consider abstaining from alcohol.
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>Ma says she found that narrative labels, the ones showing lived experiences, evoked less disgust and anger and more sympathy than nonnarrative ones. The nonnarrative labels, like the endoscopy, caused more fear than the narrative ones in the online sample, but not among the college students.
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>When it came to convincing alcohol abstention, “Fear consistently related to intentions, meaning the greater the fear, the greater the intention to reduce or stop drinking, but the college students weren’t moved by fear-based warnings,” she says. “Anger was found to be a counterproductive emotion and decreased the intention to reduce drinking. Disgust didn’t persuade anyone to do anything.
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>“Sympathy was the only significant mediator across the two sample groups,” she continues. “Sympathy was positively related to intentions to reduce or stop drinking, so the takeaway is that we want to evoke sympathy when communicating the cancer risk of alcohol. Fear is still a useful emotion, so narrative labels should also be designed to elicit fear.”

[role of sympathy in motivating behaviour change: a discrete emotions approach to examining responses to cancer warning labels for alcohol | Health Education Research | Oxford Academic](https://academic.oup.com/her/article/40/6/cyaf060/8383627)

This is interesting, although I wish the title reflected that **this study specifically relates to alcohol use**, and does not provide any data about public health behaviors more generally, like circumstances in which one’s behavior can have an impact on other people.