Putting the picture together: An investigation of visual persuasion and information in health communication contexts

There is a relative dearth in health communication research on visual messages, compared to years of work on verbal messages, to determine the best sets of features and strategies for influencing individual message reception. This project offers a review of current theorizing on visual persuasion and visual information in health communication research, a content analysis that offers an overview of how visual messages are currently used in health communication, and an experiment that examines one particular visual message strategy, visual exemplification, in the context of skin cancer. The results suggest that current communication theorizing offers numerous entry points for empirical work on visual message content and features. Health communication materials often do not adhere to design recommendations, but do seem to use visual messages strategically. Finally, the experiment suggests small shifts in visual exemplification presentation strategies vary the overall effectiveness of health messages and certain message perceptions like perceived visual informativeness and surprise help explain the influence of the exemplar presentations.