Visual Metaphors in Health Messages: A Strategy to De-Stigmatize Opioid Use Disorder

The opioid epidemic is a devastating drug crisis in American history with more than 28,000 deaths attributed to opioid use each year. Health communication campaigns can impact perceptions about the harmful effects of opioids, but they must be engaging to do so. Visual metaphors – artful deviations that visually link to abstract concepts – are one way to increase audience engagement. We sought to assess visual metaphors as a strategy to effectively communicate the harms of opioid use with a one-way experiment comparing opioid messages with a visual metaphor with opioid messages without a visual metaphor. Participants were 220 U.S. adults recruited from Amazon Mechanical Turk. Outcomes were beliefs, negative affect, perceived effectiveness, message quality, message strength, and cognitive elaboration. To assess the impact on stigma, both message conditions were compared to a no message condition. People who saw opioid messages with visual metaphors reported significantly greater negative affect than those who saw messages without a metaphor. Including a visual metaphor did not significantly impact the other perception outcomes or stigma (all p > .05). Our findings indicate that visual metaphors may be an effective strategy for eliciting emotional reactions, which can act as a critical first step for message engagement about serious health topics.Bachelor of Art