Impact of gain and nonloss framing in mental health self-care: investigating regulatory focus and perceived risk of worsening mental health as moderators

Abstract Background Previous studies have employed message framing techniques to encourage mental health behaviors [1]; however, trait-level characteristics and perceived risks have not been investigated as moderators, which may facilitate message tailoring. This study investigated the impact of gain and nonloss framing for self-care. Methods 384 participants recruited from the social media and university mass email viewed one of the gain-framing (emphasizing benefits of self-care), nonloss-framing (highlighting distress prevented through self-care), and control conditions (information not related to self-care) messages. They completed items on regulatory focus and perceived risks of worsening in mental health as potential individual moderators. Outcome variables include intention, uptake and engagement of self-care, particularly mindfulness practices, with both immediate measures and one-week follow-up measures. ANCOVAs and regressions were conducted. Results Results indicated a gain-framing advantage for self-care intention compared to control and suggestively to nonloss-framing, with tentative evidence showing that participants in the nonloss-framing condition played mindfulness audio for longer duration compared to participants in the control condition. For people with lower perceived risks, gain-framing led to higher self-care intention than both control and tentatively nonloss-framing messages, but no evidence of moderation with other dependent variables was found. Results showed no support for moderation by regulatory focus, which are inconsistent with the literature on regulatory focus-framing interaction effect in physical health contexts. Conclusions Given the lack of significant effects, our findings do not support applying tailored framing based on regulatory focus for encouraging mental health self-care. Studies using field studies, longitudinal designs, and/or well-powered studies for detecting very small effects, are needed to investigate whether gain-framing has advantages with actual self-care behaviors over longer periods of time.