Self-Affirmation, Emotion, and Alcohol Consumption

This study aims to examine whether emotional state moderates the effect of selfaffirmation on intentions to engage in proactive behavior following a message about a health threat. Specifically, we propose to examine whether selfaffirmation a process by which individuals reflect on cherished personal values differentially affects the persuasiveness of a message about the link between alcohol and breast cancer depending on whether individuals are in a particular emotional state. Previous evidence suggests that self-affirmation may reduce defensiveness to threatening health information, increasing openness to the message and resulting in increased disease risk perceptions, disease-related worry, and intentions to engage in preventive behavior. However, self-affirmation may be differentially effective depending on the prior emotional state of the individual. Human subjects (women who report having consumed five or more alcoholic beverage in the past week) will be randomly assigned to write about an emotional event (something that made them happy, fearful, angry, or surprised) or to a neutral emotion condition (writing about a room in their house). Then, they will be randomly assigned to selfaffirm (write about why a particular value is important to them) or to be in a control condition (write about why a particular value might be important to someone else). Following the autobiographical emotion task and self-affirmation, subjects will read about the link between alcohol and breast cancer. Finally, they will be asked a series of questions about their intentions to reduce drinking, their perceived risk of breast cancer, and their worry about breast cancer. Drawing on previous research, we hypothesize that self-affirmation will be most effective for those asked to recall a happy or angry experience, and least effective for those asked to recall a fearful or surprising experience.