{"doi":"10.2196/41959","title":"Effects of Prosocial and Hope-Promoting Communication Strategies on COVID-19 Worry and Intentions for Risk-Reducing Behaviors and Vaccination: Experimental Study","abstract":"BACKGROUND: The COVID-19 pandemic has engendered widespread fear and skepticism about recommended risk-reducing behaviors including vaccination. Health agencies are faced with the need to communicate to the public in ways that both provide reassurance and promote risk-reducing behaviors. Communication strategies that promote prosocial (PS) values and hope are being widely used; however, the existing research on the persuasiveness of these strategies has offered mixed evidence. There is also very little research examining the comparative effectiveness of PS and hope-promoting (HP) strategies. OBJECTIVE: The aim of this study is to evaluate the comparative effectiveness of PS and HP messages in reassuring the public and motivating COVID-19 risk-reducing behaviors. METHODS: A web-based factorial experiment was conducted in which a diverse sample of the US public was randomized to read messages which adapted existing COVID-19 information from a public website produced by a state government public health department to include alternative framing language: PS, HP, or no additional framing (control). Participants then completed surveys measuring COVID-19 worry and intentions for COVID-19 risk-reducing behaviors and vaccination. RESULTS: COVID-19 worry was unexpectedly higher in the HP than in the control and PS conditions. Intentions for COVID-19 risk-reducing behaviors did not differ between groups; however, intentions for COVID-19 vaccination were higher in the HP than in the control condition, and this effect was mediated by COVID-19 worry. CONCLUSIONS: It appears that HP communication strategies may be more effective than PS strategies in motivating risk-reducing behaviors in some contexts but with the paradoxical cost of promoting worry.","journal":"JMIR Formative Research","year":2023,"id":368058,"datarank":0.0,"base_score":0.0,"endowment":0.0,"self_citation_contribution":0.0,"citation_network_contribution":0.0,"self_endowment_contribution":0.0,"citer_contribution":0.0,"corpus_percentile":null,"corpus_rank":null,"citation_count":4,"citer_count":0,"citers_with_citation_signal":0,"citers_with_endowment":0,"datacite_reuse_total":0,"is_dataset":false,"is_dataset_confidence":0.954,"is_data_producer":false,"deposit_databanks":null,"is_oa":true,"file_count":0,"downloads":0,"has_version_chain":false,"published_date":"2023-01-01","fair_score":null,"fair_percentile":null,"algorithm_id":"datarank_citation_only_1hop_v6","ranking_scope":"data_only","authors":[{"id":480525,"name":"Leo Waterston","orcid":"0000-0003-1261-0650","position":1,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":636297,"name":"Aaron M. Scherer","orcid":"0000-0002-4134-9300","position":2,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":781392,"name":"Alistair Thorpe","orcid":"0000-0001-5078-2715","position":3,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":306812,"name":"Angela Fagerlin","orcid":"0000-0002-9192-2777","position":4,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":547126,"name":"Paul K. J. Han","orcid":"0000-0003-0165-1940","position":5,"is_corresponding":false},{"id":770130,"name":"Elizabeth Scharnetzki","orcid":"0000-0002-5727-0189","position":0,"is_corresponding":true}],"reference_count":44,"raw_metadata":null,"created_at":"2026-07-19T01:15:20.453499Z","pmid":"37379364","pmcid":null,"fwci":null,"citation_percentile":null,"influential_citations":0,"oa_status":null,"license":null,"views":0,"total_file_size_bytes":0,"version_count":0,"fair_f":null,"fair_a":null,"fair_i":null,"fair_r":null,"fair_zscore":null,"fair_rationale":null,"fair_model":null,"fair_agent_version":null,"fair_fulltext_source":null,"fair_has_llm":null,"fair_computed_at":null,"clinical_trials":[],"software_tools":[],"db_accessions":[],"linked_datasets":[],"topics":[]}