title: Selective Exposure to Health Information: The Role of Headline Features in the Choice of Health Newsletter Articles.
abstract: This study investigated how content and context features of headlines drive selective exposure when choosing between headlines of a monthly e-mail health newsletter in a naturalistic setting over a period of nine months. Study participants received a monthly e-mail newsletter and could freely open it and click any headline to read the accompanying article. In each e-mail newsletter, nine headlines competed with each other for selection. Textual and visual information of the headlines was content-analyzed, and clickstream data on the headlines were collected automatically. The results showed that headlines invited more frequent audience selections when they provided efficacy-signaling information in an imperative voice, when they used a moderate number of negative emotion words, when they presented negative thumbnail images while mentioning cancer or other diseases, and when they were placed higher in position.
authors.affiliation: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Hyun Suk
authors.initials: HS
authors.lastname: Kim
authors.affiliation: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Heather
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Forquer
authors.affiliation: JP Medical.
authors.forename: Joseph
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Rusko
authors.affiliation: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Robert C
authors.initials: RC
authors.lastname: Hornik
authors.affiliation: Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania.
authors.forename: Joseph N
authors.initials: JN
authors.lastname: Cappella
keywords: Internet; health communication; message effects; news; selective exposure