Imagine a physician told you that you had a genetic predisposition for obesity. Would you
improve your diet and exercise in order to overcome your predisposition, or would you
decide to not even bother to change your
behavior? An article published this year in Annals of Behavioral Medicine suggests that the answer to that question depends on your emotional state. Emotions influence how we interpret and react to information. In medical situations relating to chronic illness, emotions can run high.
In this experiment, researchers looked at the effects of negative emotions on beliefs about the causes of obesity and intentions to change diet and exercise after receiving messages delivered by an online, virtual physician. Participants included overweight women, who were randomized to one of six conditions that varied emotional states and information about the origins of obesity. Randomization is a method used to maximize similarity between groups and helps to rule-out existing differences in participants as an explanation for results.
Negative emotions were induced by asking participants to write about either a fear- or anger-inducing situation they experienced. This method of emotion induction is effective because the emotional situations are personally relevant to the participant. Those in the control condition wrote about a room in their house. Afterwards, participants watched videos of a virtual physician describing the origins of obesity as either genetic or behavioral. Finally, participants completed measures of their beliefs about the causes of obesity and their intentions to improve diet and exercise.
The women who heard the message about genetic predispositions for obesity reported lower intentions to change their diet and exercise, but only when they had written about a fear-inducing experience. For women who wrote about other experiences, the genetic message had no effect on their intentions to change.
The take away message from this study is that the combination of receiving genetic information from a physician while in a fearful state may uniquely lead to reduction of healthy diet and exercise behaviors. Fear can be a common emotion patients experience while interacting with physicians, and this fearful state can lead to unintended behavioral consequences after receiving medical information. Future directions include the need to determine how physicians can attend to patient emotions during encounters to improve behavioral outcomes.
Reference: Persky, S., Ferrer, R. A., & Klein, W. M. (2016). Genomic Information may Inhibit Weight-Related Behavior Change Inclinations Among Individuals in a Fear State. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 1-8.