The effect of affective versus cognitive persuasive messages on African American women's attitudes toward condom use.

Objective: Health decision making models propose that affective associations at both the implicit and explicit level and cognitive beliefs influence health behaviours. The current studies investigated whether affective or cognitive persuasive messages would lead to more positive implicit and explicit condom use attitudes and higher intentions among African American college women.

Design: Participants (Study 1  = 109; Study 2  = 112) explicit attitudes were assess prior to watching a short video that contained either affective (e.g., safe sex is pleasurable) or cognitive messages (e.g., latex condoms are effective in preventing HIV) in favour of condom use.

Main Outcome Measures: Following the video, participants completed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP), a measure of implicit attitudes, explicit measures of condom use attitudes that assessed attitudes at the overall and component level, intentions to use condoms, and interest in receiving free sample of condoms.

Results: Participants in the affective message condition reported more positive condom use attitudes on both the implicit and explicit measure, higher intentions to use condoms, and more interest in receiving free condoms than those in the cognitive message condition.

Conclusion: These results suggest that affective messages may be more effective in changing condom use attitudes, which can be used in interventions to promote protective condom use behaviours.