Emotional experiences of reading health educational manga encouraging behavioral changes: a non-randomized controlled trial

Abstract

Objective: Educational health manga are used to promote health behavior change. This study thus seeks to achieve the following objectives: identify the emotional experience of reading educational health manga, understand the effects of facilitating the psychological mediators of behavior change through emotional experiences, and compare the effectiveness of educational health manga with conventional materials. Design: A non-randomized controlled trial with six conditions was conducted. Target behaviors were physical activity and healthy diet. Individuals aged 20-69 years (n = 1,680) were assigned three manga intervention conditions and three control conditions (visual image-based, narrative text, and general text material). Main Outcome Measures: Participants were asked about their emotional experience while reading either intervention material or control material and its perceived positive influence on enhancing psychological mediators. Results: Four factors relevant to emotional experiences were identified: risk perception, familiarity, satisfaction, and realism. Emotional experience strongly predicted the psychological mediators of behavior change. Analysis of differences among the six conditions revealed that exposure to educational health manga led to greater satisfaction and increased knowledge. Participants assigned manga conditions experienced superior emotional experiences and outcomes. Conclusions: Those assigned manga conditions experienced superior emotional experiences and outcomes. The efficacy of educational health manga in encouraging psychological mediators of change was confirmed.Trial registration: UMIN Japan identifier: UMIN000034369.

Learning from comics versus non-comics material in education: Systematic review and meta-analysis

“…The lack of consensus in the findings of studies that have investigated the effectiveness of comics when it comes to learning could be attributed to various differences in the experimental procedures. These differences include the target educational fields of STEM (e.g., Wiseman et al, 2021;Shimazaki et al, 2021;Freedman et al, 2022) versus non-STEM (e.g., Cohen et al, 2020;Istiq'faroh et al, 2020;Owens et al, 2020), or target population of students (e.g., Lin et al, 2016;Damopolii et al, 2021) versus the public (e.g., Rodriguez et al, 2016;Shimazaki et al, 2021;Wiseman et al, 2021). The media comparisons also differ between text (e.g., Leiner et al, 2018), animation (e.g., Walsh et al, 2021), or video (e.g.., Kolberg et al, 2021).…”

“…In addition, several studies show moderation by individual differences, such as visual language fluency (e.g., Cohn, 2013;Spiegel et al, 2013;Wang et al, 2019), student's achievement level (e.g., Lin et al, 2016Topkaya et al, 2020); while others don't (e.g., Damopolii et al, 2021). Finally, the intervention style differs across the studies, with some studies following a quasi-experimental design (e.g., Kim et al, 2017), others an experimental design (e.g., Muzumdar et al, 2018), some including a follow up measurement (e.g., Sumengen et al, 2023) others not (e.g., Shimazaki et al, 2021), and some utilizing comics as a main (e.g., Albero et al, 2021) while others as a complementary (e.g., Khoii et al, 2010) intervention.…”