P-148 EFFECTIVENESS OF USING HUMOR APPEAL IN HEALTH PROMOTION MATERIALS

Occupational health professionals develop messages and materials to persuade employees to adopt healthy behaviors or reduce risky behaviors. Health promotion materials do not always have the desired effect due to failure to capture the interest of target audience. We examined the effect of humor appeal (i.e. using humor as an advertising technique to attract attention and increase acceptance of the message) in health promotion materials and how to use it effectively.

We prepared printable Posters with different illustrations (humorous vs. non-humorous) × frames (loss- vs. gain-framed) for 5 health topics (smoking cessation, physical activity, cancer screening, bone marrow donor registry, and advance care planning). Web-based surveys were conducted among Japanese adults aged 25-64 years, who were randomly assigned one of the Posters (200 people each) and asked to rate it for persuasiveness (EHPM 2017;22:69) and resistance (EHPM 2022;27:20). The overall score was calculated as the persuasiveness score minus the resistance score. ANOVA was used to compare the mean scores across Posters.

For the advance care planning Posters, the highest overall score was found in the humorous gain-framed, followed by the humorous loss-framed and the non-humorous. For the other 4 health-topic Posters, the non-humorous version scored significantly higher than the humorous versions.

The use of humor appeal made the message more persuasive when dealing with a little-known health topic like advance care planning but did not when dealing with common health issues like smoking and physical inactivity.

Humor appeal can help to introduce a new health topic to a wider audience.