4.1. Explanations of the Findings
breast cancer
BREAST CANCER
Under the backdrop of daughter-to-mother health communication and the increasingly prominent eHealth campaigns, this experimental study examines how the EPPM core constructs interact with virality to affect female college students’ intention to recommend breast cancer screening to their mothers. Several findings merit further discussion.Firstly, the interaction effect of efficacy and virality on message involvement is only significant in the low-threat condition, and the combination of low-threat, high-efficacy, and high-virality can evoke a higher level of message involvement. This finding is somewhat beyond our initial expectations and inconsistent with the fundamental propositions of the EPPM. The multiplicative manner of EPPM advocates that individuals are motivated to take recommended measures to deter threats when they simultaneously perceive high levels of threat and efficacy [Secondly, different from EPPM’s original propositions, which assume that when the threat is perceived as low, individuals have no adequate motivation to further process the fear appeal messages [Thirdly, consistent with the preceding works [Fourthly, the three-way interaction effect between message characteristics and platform-generated cues on recommendation intention is only significant indirectly through message involvement, reflecting the unneglectable function of elaboration in inducing recommendation intention. This finding confirms that the cognitive process is indispensable in health persuasion [