Perceived vulnerability to COVID-19, dispositional optimism and intention to adopt preventive health behaviour: an experiment with anti-smoking advertising

Abstract

Purpose High dispositional optimism is often associated with people engaging in behaviour that has adverse effects on their health such as smoking. This study aims to investigate people’s intention to adopt preventive health behaviour by observing the effectiveness of anti-smoking ads during the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Design/methodology/approach Two studies have been carried out, first with a UK sample and second with the US sample. The studies examined the effectiveness of anti-smoking ad (appeal: high fear vs low fear), smoking behaviour elicited perception of vulnerability to COVID-19 and dispositional optimism on lowering people’s urge to smoke. Findings The study findings revealed a high fear appeal ad is more effective in lowering people’s urge to smoke. However, this association is significantly mediated by perception of vulnerability to COVID-19. Further, high dispositional optimism was found to moderate the effect of the anti-smoking ad on the perception of vulnerability to COVID-19, although a comparatively smaller effect was observed for the UK sample. Finally, high dispositional optimism significantly moderated the mediation of vulnerability to COVID-19 on lower urge to smoke only for the US sample. Originality/value The study highlights a need for a greater collaborative effort by the public, government, firms in the business of nicotine replacement solutions, socially responsible cigarette and tobacco manufacturing firms and health agencies that may lead to increased preventive health behaviour during the ongoing pandemic.

COVID-19 and seasonal flu vaccination hesitancy: Links to personality and general intelligence in a large, UK cohort

“…Future work should consider including factors such as pathogen disgust sensitivity and political ideology. Fourthly, the associations found with seasonal flu vaccination hesitancy may be partly explained by the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has resulted in people taking up more preventative health measures ADDIN ZOTERO_ITEM CSL_CITATION {“citationID”:“xtHYGPDQ”,“properties”:{“formattedCitation”:“ [21] , [40] ”,“plainCitation”:“ [21] , [40] ”,“noteIndex”:0},“citationItems”:[{“id”:1556,“uris”:[“http://zotero.org/users/5523892/items/372TCRVN”],“itemData”:{“id”:1556,“type”:“article-journal”,“abstract”:“Purpose\nHigh dispositional optimism is often associated with people engaging in behaviour that has adverse effects on their health such as smoking. This study aims to investigate people’s intention to adopt preventive health behaviour by observing the effectiveness of anti-smoking ads during the ongoing coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic.\n\n\nDesign/methodology/approach\nTwo studies have been carried out, first with a UK sample and second with the US sample.…”

“…Only the inclusion of the cognitive variables substantially increased the explained variance of the self-reported adoption of preventive behaviors (R 2 change = 23% in survey 1 and 2), providing better support for the social cognitive than the sociocultural and psychosocial explanations.”,“container-title”:“Frontiers in Psychology”,“DOI”:“10.3389/fpsyg.2020.584500”,“ISSN”:“1664-1078”,“journalAbbreviation”:“Front. Psychol.”,“language”:“en”,“page”:“584500”,“source”:“DOI.org (Crossref)”,“title”:“Determinants of preventive behaviors in response to the covid-19 pandemic in france: comparing the sociocultural, psychosocial, and social cognitive explanations”,“volume”:“11”,“author”:[{“family”:“Raude”,“given”:“Jocelyn”},{“family”:“Lecrique”,“given”:“Jean-Michel”},{“family”:“Lasbeur”,“given”:“Linda”},{“family”:“Leon”,“given”:“Christophe”},{“family”:“Guignard”,“given”:“Romain”},{“family”:“Roscoät”,“given”:“Enguerrand”,“non-dropping-particle”:“du”},{“family”:“Arwidson”,“given”:“Pierre”}],“issued”:{“date-parts”:[[“2020”,11,30]]},“citation-key”:“raudeDeterminantsPreventiveBehaviors2020”}}],“schema”:“https://github.com/citation-style-language/schema/raw/master/csl-citation.json”} [21] , [40] . The seasonal flu vaccine represents a preventative health measure, as it would be protective against a flu infection occurring at the same time as a potential COVID infection, which may lead to associations carrying over from COVID to flu.…”

COVID-19 perceptions, subjective norms, and perceived benefits to attitude and behavior of continuous using of medical mask

“…Positive attitudes tend to positively influence behavioral intentions. Although TPB initially appeared in the organizational behavior literature, in recent years, TPB has been used in various studies on consumer behavior (Kement et al, 2020;Sumaedi et al, 2020;Kapoor & Singhal, 2021;Liu et al, 2021). Including the behavior of buying masks (Shah et al, 2020).…”

The restless desire for the new versus sustainability: the pressing need for social marketing in fashion industry

“…This conceptual study’s original contribution to social marketing studies comes from revealing in detail the challenges and potential downstream and upstream solutions at micro, meso and macro levels for aligning consumers’ restless desire for newness and the pressing need for sustainability. Furthermore, many of the studies conducted in social marketing field have been in health-related contexts such as preventing obesity (Bastos et al , 2021), observing the effectiveness of antismoking advertisement (Kapoor and Singhal, 2021) or promoting HIV prevention messages (Edelstein et al , 2020), to name a few. Social marketing studies in the context of fashion is limited (Kennedy et al , 2017).…”