The effects of perceived stress on reactions to messages designed to increase health behaviors.

This study examined the impact of perceived stress on responses to messages that encouraged the performance of health promotion and disease detection behaviors. It was hypothesized that increases in perceived stress would be associated with decreased processing of messages encouraging disease detection behaviors, and that increases in perceived stress would not effect the processing of messages encouraging health promotion behaviors. To test these hypotheses participants completed a perceived stress measure and then read a message that encouraged the performance of either a health promotion or a disease detection behavior. Then the participants were asked to indicate their agreement with the message and to attempt to recall the message. The results indicated that participants experiencing higher levels of perceived stress spent less time reading and recalled less of the messages about detection behaviors than of the messages about promotion behaviors. When participants were experiencing lower levels of perceived stress these differences disappeared.