Trial reportHealth education research2025
The role of sympathy in motivating behaviour change: a discrete emotions approach to examining responses to cancer warning labels for alcohol.
Trial report in Health education research, 2025. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 1 paper.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
1 citing paper in PubMed.
- Defensive Reactions to Pictorial Warning Labels Featuring Narrative Versus Non-Narrative Content.Health communication · 2026Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
3 authors.
Funding
Abstract
This study investigated how fear, disgust, anger, and sympathy relate to the effectiveness of pictorial warning labels (PWLs) designed to communicate alcohol-related cancer risks. We recruited two samples: (1) an online panel of moderate and heavy drinkers (aged 21-84), and (2) college student drinkers (aged 18-28). Participants were randomly assigned to view either three narrative PWLs depicting lived experiences or three non-narrative PWLs showing diseased organs. Across both samples, narrative PWLs elicited lower levels of anger and disgust and higher levels of sympathy than non-narrative PWLs. Narrative PWLs also generated less fear than non-narrative PWLs among the online panel participants, but not among college student drinkers. Moreover, in the online panel sample, narrative PWLs decreased intentions to reduce and stop drinking due to lower fear, but simultaneously increased intentions to reduce drinking due to a decrease in anger and an increase in sympathy. Among college students, narrative PWLs promoted intentions to reduce and stop drinking only through greater sympathy. These findings highlight sympathy as a key emotional pathway for promoting behavioural change. In designing cancer warning labels for alcohol, communicators should consider avoiding appeals that provoke disgust or anger and instead use narrative approaches to evoke sympathetic responses in consumers.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.