Visual Nudges and Smoking Prevention: Exploring Implicit and Explicit Emotional Responses to Graphic Health Warnings

This article presents two studies (N = 301) investigating the implicit and explicit effects of graphic health warnings (GHWs) on smoking prevention. Framed within the intersection of implicit cognition and bounded rationality models, we aim to characterize GHWs as Type 1 nudges driven by automatic processing and evaluate the consistency of observed effects with this characterization. In the first study, participants performed the Affect Misattribution Procedure (AMP) with a prime exposure time of 75 milliseconds (ms). Participants were randomly assigned to an experimental condition with graphic warnings as primes or a control condition with neutral images from the International Affective Picture System (IAPS). Results indicated that graphic warnings produced significantly more negative valence and faster implicit evaluations of the target stimuli compared to neutral images. The second study utilized a modified AMP where participants evaluated the valence of the prime images directly, with an extended exposure time of 500ms. This study also demonstrated significant differences in both image valence and reaction times, consistent with the findings from the first study, indicating explicit effects of the graphic warnings. Our findings suggest a translation process from implicit to explicit effects, shedding light on the relationship between automatic and controlled processing in the context of nudges. These results have key implications for understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying health warnings and optimizing their design for public health interventions.