5. Discussion
infection, guilt, infections, COVID-19 infection
DISEASE, INFECTIONS, COVID-19 INFECTION, INFECTION, CORONAVIRUS
The pandemic caused by COVID-19 has posed a global challenge that has required the coordinated action of local, state and international institutions. The main challenge during the pandemic was to reduce the number of infections and cases of COVID-19 to avoid overwhelming healthcare systems [This paper focused precisely on the communicative challenge posed by the pandemic to stimulate prevention behaviors. Building on research on narrative persuasion and, partially, on the impact of fear appeals (see [The experiment, carried out with a convenience sample (N = 278) of young people aged 18 to 28 years, allowed us to advance our knowledge on the psychological mechanisms that explained the impact of two message features (the severity of the infection described in the testimonial and the infection target) on preventive measures, such as the perceived personal risk of contracting COVID-19, the perceived severity of COVID-19 and the intention to engage in preventive behavior. Five hypotheses were established, although only two of them received empirical support.The first hypothesis predicted that when the narrative described the person infected with COVID-19 as the protagonist’s father, there would be less identification with the protagonist of the message, especially when the symptoms caused by the disease were severe. This hypothesis was based on research on the (positive or negative) characteristics of narrative message protagonists and their effects on identification [The second hypothesis predicted an effect of the severity of the symptoms narrated in the message on narrative transportation. However, this hypothesis did not receive empirical support either. Nonetheless, in this case, it was observed that, overall, the testimonial message induced a level of narrative transportation (M = 4.18, SD = 1.17) above the theoretical midpoint of the scale (value of four; t(277) = 2.58, The fourth hypothesis did receive empirical support. It was hypothesized that a narrative message describing a serious infection affecting the protagonist of the story could be considered a fear appeal. Therefore, it was considered that such a combination of elements in the message would elicit a heightened perception of the severity of the infection described in the testimonial. The results were consistent with this prediction, which was in line with the postulates of the EPPM [Finally, a moderated serial–parallel mediation model was proposed. It was considered that for a narrative message to have a persuasive impact on measures related to COVID-19 prevention, it had to stimulate a series of psychological processes acting as mediating mechanisms. The analysis of the specific conditional indirect effects showed that both cognitive elaboration and reactance were relevant mechanisms to explain the impact of the characteristics of the message on the dependent variables considered (perceived personal risk of contracting COVID-19, perceived severity of the disease, and intention to engage in preventive behavior). Therefore, it was noted that for a message describing a severe COVID-19 infection affecting their protagonist to increase the perception of personal risk, the perception that COVID-19 is a serious disease and that preventive action is necessary (not attending parties or gatherings for fear of contracting coronavirus), a dual process had to be activated. Thus, two routes were established that would explain the persuasive impact, first through activating the perception that the infection described in the message was severe and the subsequent increase in cognitive processing (e.g., “reading the message has made me think deeply about measures to prevent the transmission of the coronavirus”) and second through the activation of the perception that the infection narrated in the message was severe and the subsequent reduction in reactance (e.g., “the message was trying to manipulate me”). More importantly, the results of this study showed that identification and narrative transportation did not constitute relevant mediating mechanisms.The present study had two major limitations. Firstly, it did not include any measure of the emotional impact provoked by the reading of the testimonial messages (fear and guilt, in particular). It would have been interesting to contrast the effect of the infection target on the experience of guilt and, subsequently, to analyze the relationship between guilt and reactance. The second limitation of this work was that the proposed mediators were measured rather than experimentally manipulated, which prevented drawing conclusions with complete certainty regarding the proposed causal sequence between the different psychological mechanisms. However, although temporal precedence is an important element for establishing a causal inference, it is also necessary to propose a theoretical argument about the relationship between the mediating mechanisms, a condition that our work fulfilled by relying on theoretical models of narrative persuasion (EORM) [