The use of narrative text in health messaging has been ubiquitous. With the popularity of promoting public health on social media, it becomes critical to investigate what visual images should be used to maximize the impact of narrative health-related posts. This study focused on messages designed to communicate the breast cancer risk associated with alcohol use. We conducted a 2 (text: narrative vs. non-narrative) x 2 (visuals: exemplar vs. non-exemplar) between-subjects online experiment (N = 299). Our results showed that narrative (vs. non-narrative) text led to greater attention, stronger negative emotions, and higher intentions to seek information about alcohol use and cancer among female drinkers. The visual exemplar (vs. non-exemplar) also produced higher intentions to seek information and reduce alcohol use. More importantly, including a visual exemplar (vs. non-exemplar) significantly increased negative emotions and subsequently behavioral intentions when the text was a narrative, but the visual content did not make a difference when the text was a non-narrative. The results of this study show the importance of adding a relevant visual exemplar to narrative text, such as a photo of the character, to improve message effectiveness.

在健康信息中使用叙述性文本已经无处不在。随着在社交媒体上促进公共卫生的普及，研究应该使用哪些视觉图像来最大限度地提高叙事健康相关帖子的影响变得至关重要。这项研究的重点是旨在传达与饮酒相关的乳腺癌风险的信息。我们进行了 2（文本：叙述与非叙述）x 2（视觉：范例与非范例）受试者之间的在线实验（N = 299）。我们的研究结果表明，叙事（相对于非叙事）文本会导致女性饮酒者获得更多关注、更强烈的负面情绪以及寻求有关酒精使用和癌症信息的更高意图。视觉示例（与非示例相比）也产生了更高的寻求信息和减少酒精使用的意图。更重要的是，当文本是叙事时，包括视觉示例（与非示例相比）显着增加了负面情绪和随后的行为意图，但当文本是非叙事时，视觉内容没有影响。这项研究的结果表明，在叙事文本中添加相关的视觉范例（例如角色的照片）以提高信息有效性的重要性。