Emotion and personal story in factual writing
Emotion and personal stories can draw readers into health information, connect it to their experience and influence how they respond. Their persuasive force also creates a risk: a compelling story can conceal weak evidence or opposing views. The emotional appeal and the factual account therefore need to be considered together.
Emotional engagement and trust
A health-communication strategist's model connects narrative credibility to emotion and relatability: readers identify with characters, begin to adopt their goals and beliefs, and picture themselves in the story. In this model, the resulting warmth establishes trust, and trust combined with expertise creates credibility. The strategist proposed narratives as a way to rebuild trust in expert opinion, enhance learning and promote healthy behaviour, particularly in disadvantaged populations.
Five advantages over facts and figures alone were proposed.
- Better comprehension because processing the information requires fewer cognitive resources.
- Better memory and recall through shorter reading times and anchoring information to existing knowledge.
- More behavioural change as improved recall and understanding trigger situational awareness: people imagine going through the experience, make decisions and cue appropriate behaviour.
- Less controversy and counter-arguing as emotional involvement makes the desired outcome feel inevitable.
- Less reliance on fear, which in excess impedes the ability to process and act on information.
The same practitioner recommended narrative for people with low health literacy who may find scientific data unfamiliar, overwhelming or cold, and for messages requiring cultural tailoring. Other proposed applications were complex social and personal issues, such as sex education, and audiences resistant to new information, such as adolescents and sceptics.
Different emotions and different responses
Emotion-focused preventive health communication distinguishes negative emotions such as fear, guilt and sadness from positive emotions such as hope, elevation and inspiration. Negative emotions commonly involve a discrepancy between reality, or an apparently inevitable future, and what someone thinks they should experience; positive emotions can engage what a person thinks they can achieve or would like to achieve.
The antismoking truth campaign begun in Florida in the 1990s framed tobacco companies as manipulators, using young people's anger at manipulation to encourage them not to buy tobacco products. Exercise-focused video games can instead evoke hope that players can replicate the success of characters or community exemplars with whom they identify.
Life experience and mood before and during a message affect reactions and behaviour. A campaign that motivates some people can provoke negative emotions with unwanted behavioural consequences or attitudes towards the messenger in others.
Sustained reporting about a person
Following a person through illness can create tension between the reporter's relationship with the subject and the outlet's demand for a publishable story. While covering the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention for an Atlanta daily, a reporter followed his colleague Tom Fox's daily struggle with AIDS alongside his usual reporting work. The reporter felt he was living in two worlds: to him Fox was a person fighting for his life, while to his editor Fox was a headline waiting to run. The complete story, “When AIDS Comes Home”, appeared after Fox's death in 1989 and won national awards, along with grudging praise from colleagues at the paper.
Drama and health information
A physician and television writer used controversial medical and public-health issues, including AIDS and childhood immunisation, as stories grounded in people's daily struggles. His view was that watching characters argue through a moving story could engage viewers and leave them thinking about an issue differently. In the Law & Order: SVU episode “Selfish”, a young child's death after contracting measles from an unvaccinated child served a story about responsibility to the community.
Kaiser Family Foundation surveys of ER viewers found increased awareness of human papillomavirus (HPV) and a statistically significant increase in the proportion able to define it accurately after an episode referring to HPV and cervical cancer. Reported survey findings about learning from the programme also included three responses.
- 53% said they learned about important health issues from ER.
- One-third obtained information that helped them with their family.
- One-seventh discussed what they had seen with a doctor or other healthcare provider.
The television writer advocated using storytelling to produce social change.
Manipulation and lost context
Storytelling in science attracts two views: one holds that emotion-driven responses can manipulate readers when storytellers embellish or conceal information; the other holds that stories can be told with care and honesty, avoiding writing so dehumanised that it loses its connection with readers.
Narratives can overgeneralise from small or biased samples. Their resistance to counter-argument can make claims based on little or no data difficult to dispute, and concealing opposing views can turn teaching and informing into unbalanced persuasion or manipulation. Before using narrative, writers should decide whether they want to open controversy and discussion for greater understanding or reduce controversy through acceptance, which is persuasion. They should also consider the required accuracy: narratives can work without scientifically exact information, and a relaxed narrative may fail to convey elements requiring rigid accuracy.
Personal stories can also capture attention while missing opportunities to explain the science and its wider social context. A public-health communicator contrasted the familiar triumph-or-tragedy arc with a coherent account of public health: a newspaper story about high-tech heart-disease treatments may be dramatic, while discussing the social costs of heart failure and ways to reduce its occurrence could probably have greater public-health impact.