How allusion enhances consumer response to hope appeals in health messaging
通过三项实验，研究了在健康公益广告中使用希望诉求时，加入典故这种修辞手法能增强消费者的视觉注意、参与度和信息效果，且自我效能感起中介作用。
While fear appeals often appear in health-oriented Public Service Announcements (PSAs), three experiments demonstrate that a positive appeal, hope, can be effectively used in PSAs to promote healthy eating when combined with an allusion, a type of figurative language. Specifically, Study 1 uses eye-tracking to establish that allusion moderates hope’s encouragement of visual attention and engagement. Study 2′s experiment illustrates how allusion moderates hope’s influence on message outcomes. Study 3 tests whether self-efficacy mediates the relationships between hope and allusion on message outcomes using Hayes PROCESS modeling. Results support self-efficacy’s mediation of the hope-allusion interaction on message response outcomes. One contribution is the investigation of a multimodal allusion incorporating both visual and verbal elements and its ability to enhance message effectiveness. This study also advances the theoretical understanding of the use of positive emotional appeals and the power of self-efficacy to account for their effects in health promotion PSAs.