Abstracts Health Sciences

Exploring the role of emotions on health decisions: Case studies in cancer screening, vaccination, and nutrition

by Mehrnaz Mostafapourdehcheshmeh

Introduction One of main the objectives of public health is to promote behaviors that improve mental and physical health. Consequently, public health researchers have been studying models of behaviorchange/decision-making for decades in order to understand how to propel people’s behavior. However, most of the traditional health behavior models are consequentialist models that view decision-making mostly as a cognitive process, in which an individual evaluates a set of alternatives based on certain criteria (i.e., perceived risks, perceived benefits, perceived cost, etc.) to choose the option that holds the best health outcomes. However, during the past two decades a growing stream of research has considered and examined the role of emotions on health decisions and behavior. The results of this stream of research demonstrate the significant role that emotions play in making health decisions. Therefore, understanding how emotions influence health decisions is critical to inform effective health interventions and policies. This thesis contributes to the existing body of the literature that examines the role of emotions on health decisions by investigating how emotions affect health decisions in the domains of vaccination, breast cancer screening, and nutrition. Background Decision and behavioral researchers have proposed a variety of emotional theories to explain how emotions affect judgement and decisions. Some of these theories are recognized as valence-based theories, such as affect transfer theory or affect as information hypothesis, that demonstrate how positive or negative emotions affect the decision-making process. However, the valence-based theories of emotions lack the explanatory power to address the difference that the-same-valence emotions (e.g., fear and sadness) have on judgement and decisions. Therefore, decision researchers adapted and advanced cognitive appraisal theories of emotions to illustrate how various discrete positive/negative emotions influence judgement and decisions based on cognitive appraisal tendencies associated with the emotions. This thesis utilizes both valence-based and cognitive appraisal theories of emotions to further the understanding of how emotions affect health decisions. More specifically, this thesis includes the following independent studies that all explore the role of emotions on health decisions in various domains. Research problems and methods The first study is a narrative review of the literature on the role of emotions on judgement and decisions with a focus on health decisions that 1-presents a highlight of the new findings and theories regarding the role of emotions in judgment and decision-making in an organized way, and 2- presents a broad range of examples and published work demonstrating how to apply these findings to inform more effective health interventions and policies. The second study investigates how affective evaluation of a vaccine can influence child vaccination, utilizing the affect as information hypothesis as a lens. The study examines the…