Psychologists have long known that emotions can be a powerful motivator in moving people to action. What's less clear is how to spark emotional connections with audiences. In the interest of learning how better to create these connections, this paper's author compared the effects of different ways of presenting a message (message modality) and different kinds of messages (framed in terms of gains or losses) on people's emotional response and their intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviors.
The author, a psychologist, presented 161 university students with messages related to environmental issues. Some students viewed messages presented only with text, while others read the same text and also a viewed a short (15 to 20 seconds) video with no audio that complemented the text's theme. The researcher prepared two types of text and video messages. One was framed positively, in terms of gains, while the other type was framed in terms of losses. For example, in two texts related to South American rain forests, the losses-framed message indicated that an extensive amount of forests have been lost, and indicated the implications of this forest loss for contributing to climate change. The gains-framed message, on the other hand, focused on how conservation efforts have been successful in preserving pristine forests, and indicated the associated benefits for limiting climate change. The accompanying video for these texts (shown only to half the students) complemented the text, depicting either the loss of forests or the gain of protected areas.
After presenting the students with the messages, the researcher gave the students a short survey, which included Watson and Clark's Positive and Negative Affect Scale, which is designed to measure emotional responses. The students indicated the degree to which they felt negative emotions such as fear, irritability, guilt, or distress and positive emotions such as determination, enthusiasm, excitement, and interest. The instrument also included a items assessing their intentions to engage in environmental behaviors, such as the likelihood that they would join an environmental group on campus.
The researcher found that the students who viewed video clips were more likely to report intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviors than students who did not see the associated short videos. The researcher did not find any correlation between the students' behavioral intentions and the message frame. The researcher had hypothesized that the loss-framed group might experience greater behavioral intentions, based on previous research related to environmental behavior. But, the author notes, “that these findings are not consistent with previous research on message framing and environmental communication may not be surprising.” Findings in other fields have yielded mixed results in terms of the effectiveness of losses- or gains-framed messages in spurring behavior. Other fields have, however, consistently tied emotional arousal with behavioral intentions, and this research was in line with those other findings. The author found that there was a reliable relationship between students' emotional arousal and their intentions to act for the environment.
The author acknowledges, though, that there is a difference between behavioral intentions and actual behaviors. And the author also notes that while it's clear that emotional responses lead to intentions to act, it's not clear from this research how to best elicit emotional responses, or what kinds of factors influence a person's emotional response.
The Bottom Line
This research suggests that helping an audience make an emotional connection to an issue can lead to more positive intentions to engage in pro-environmental behaviors. And it appears from this research that film can enhance a message beyond simple text, leading to more positive behavioral intentions. But the participants in this experiment were no more motivated by messages framed in terms of losses than messages framed in terms of gains. Previous studies have yielded mixed results on the question of the relative effectiveness of gains- and losses-framed messages, and this research did not help clarify that controversy. But it does reinforce what is probably an instinct among environmental communicators: it's important to make an emotional connection with the audience, and enhancing text with film can be an effective way to do that.