Reducing Health Information Avoidance by Mental Contrasting

Objective: Staying informed on one’s health is critical for positive health outcomes. However, the possibility of receiving bad news leads many people (via both deliberate and automatic processes) to opt out of learning personal health information. The self-regulation exercise of mental contrasting has helped people improve a vast range of behaviors, and this study is the first to test its effectiveness in helping people reduce health information avoidance. We hypothesized that participants who engaged in mental contrasting would be more open to learning their personal melanoma risk than participants who completed a reflection activity. Method: A randomized controlled trial was administered on MTurk (n = 354). Participants completed a mental contrasting exercise or a reflection activity before filling out a melanoma risk calculator. Upon completion of the calculator, they chose whether and how much information they would like to learn about their melanoma risk. Results: Chi-square testing indicated that mental contrasting was effective in decreasing melanoma risk avoidance. Conclusion: As a brief and engaging method of reducing health information avoidance, mental contrasting may be useful in real health settings. Keywords: health information avoidance, mental contrasting, Fantasy Realization TheoryBachelor of Art