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Research

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We are different and we are the same. #WeAreEssex

Something else

Research project

Health beliefs and health messaging

Research overview

The power of beliefs about health: using health messages to help people make positive decisions and reduce mortality risk.

Health messaging is important to raise public awareness and to promote positive decision-making with regard to behaviours such as taking up vaccines, invitations to screening for cervical, breast or colorectal cancer, and to shape responses to symptoms of illness such as the common cold, heart disease, stroke or sepsis for example.

Messaging and framing of information is also important in interactions between patients and doctors, for example in the context of patients inappropriately requesting antibiotics. Our work in this area seeks to identify elements of effective communication, including the roles of culture or socioeconomic status in effective communication.

The studies in this area include:

beliefs and messaging to promote bowel screening uptake in currently under-represented south Asian populations in England;
cross-cultural research on messages that might change public demand for antibiotics;
a study to identify beliefs underlying a positive or negative response to an invitation for a lung health-check so as to inform the roll-out of this service;
how people respond to the inception of common cold symptoms and identify what particular representations of illness lead people to either recommend self-care or unnecessary doctor visits;
what makes people more susceptible and more willing to share health misinformation?

Workshops

EEPRU is sponsor to a series of workshops organised by the Antimicrobials, Behaviour and Cognition Network on the role of behaviour in antimicrobial resistance held at the Department of Psychology in 2023 and 2024.

Participants at the 2023 workshop

Example papers

Orbell, S., & Farris, O. (2025). Psychological processes in screening behaviour. In K. Brown, M. Hagger, C. Cheng, K. Hamilton, & S. Sutton (Eds.), Sage handbook of health psychology (2nd ed., Vol. 2, Section 5: Health protection interventions and long-term conditions). Sage Publications.
Orbell, S., Perugini, M., & Rakow, T. (2004). Individual Differences in Sensitivity to Health Communications: Consideration of Future Consequences. Health Psychology, 23(4), 388–396.
Orbell, S., & Hagger, M. (2006). Temporal framing and the decision to take part in type 2 diabetes screening: Effects of individual differences in consideration of future consequences on persuasion. Health Psychology, 25(4), 537–548.
Orbell, S., & Alison Phillips, L. (2019). Automatic processes and self-regulation of illness. Health Psychology Review, 13(4), 378–405.
Sirota, M., Round, T., Samaranayaka, S., & Kostopoulou, O. (2017). Expectations for antibiotics increase their prescribing: Causal evidence about localized impact. Health Psychology, 36(4), 402–409.
Thorpe, Alistair and Sirota, Miroslav and Orbell, Sheina and Juanchich, Marie (2021) Effect of information on reducing inappropriate expectations and requests for antibiotics. British Journal of Psychology, 112 (3). pp. 804-827. ISSN 0007-1269
Navarrete, G., Correia, R., Sirota, M., Juanchich, M., & Huepe, D. (2015). Doctor, what does my positive test mean? From Bayesian textbook tasks to personalized risk communication. Frontiers in psychology, 6, 1327.
Sirota, M., Juanchich, M., Petrova, D., Garcia-Retamero, R., Walasek, L., & Bhatia, S. (2018). Health Professionals Prefer to Communicate Risk-Related Numerical Information Using "1-in-X" Ratios. Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making, 38(3), 366–376.
Sirota, M., & Juanchich, M. (2019). Ratio Format Shapes Health Decisions: The Practical Significance of the "1-in-X" Effect. Medical decision making : an international journal of the Society for Medical Decision Making, 39(1), 32–40.
Thorpe, A., Sirota, M., Juanchich, M., & Orbell, S. (2020). Action bias in the public's clinically inappropriate expectations for antibiotics. Journal of experimental psychology. Applied, 26(3), 422–431.