title: A Meta-Analysis of the Effectiveness of Guilt on Health-Related Attitudes and Intentions.
abstract: Guilt appeals are successful in encouraging healthy behaviors as proved by many studies. However, there has been no previous systematic review of guilt research in health domain. Thus, a meta-analysis of eight studies (2,061 subjects) was conducted to examine the effectiveness of guilt on health-related attitudes and intentions. The result revealed a strong positive overall effect of guilt (r = .49, 95% CI 0.31-0.64) despite the heterogeneity. Guilt had a stronger power in changing attitudes/intentions when paired with text-only messages than text-picture mixed messages. For studies using a college sample, the percentage of females marginally moderated the effect of guilt. Whether a message was self focused or other focused did not significantly moderate the effect of guilt. Future directions and practical implications are provided.
authors.affiliation: a Department of Communication , University of Connecticut.
authors.forename: Zhan
authors.initials: Z
authors.lastname: Xu
authors.affiliation: b Department of Biostatistics and Computational Biology , Dana Farber Cancer Institute.
authors.forename: Hao
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Guo
mesh_terms: D001294:Attitude to Health; D006167:Guilt; D015438:Health Behavior; D006801:Humans; D033182:Intention; D010565:Persuasive Communication; D040242:Risk Reduction Behavior; D060145:Text Messaging; D014495:Universities