Fear of Detection and Efficacy of Prevention: Using Construal Level to Encourage Health Behaviors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This research examines the psychological processes and factors that shape illness-detection versus illness-prevention health actions. Four experiments using contexts of mental health, skin cancer, and breast cancer show that illness detection evokes fear, which undermines engagement in detection behaviors. Considering detection at low (vs. high) levels of thought reduced fear and increased health persuasion. Illness prevention is driven by self-efficacy perceptions and considering prevention at high (vs. low) levels of thought increases persuasion. In further evidence of process, trait fear moderated the detection effects, and dispositional self-efficacy moderated the prevention effects. As an intervention, framing a detection action as serving illness-prevention goals increased people’s likelihood of engaging with an online breast cancer detection tool. These findings illuminate the psychology of detection as being distinct from the psychology of prevention, identify the role of fear in the consideration of health behaviors, and show contexts in which construal levels have divergent effects on health persuasion.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.009 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".