Elsevier

Current Opinion in Psychology

Volume 5, October 2015, Pages 85-89
Current Opinion in Psychology

Risk perceptions and health behavior

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.03.012Get rights and content

Highlights

  • Interventions that change risk perceptions subsequently change health behaviors.

  • Individuals form risk perceptions tailored to specific health threats.

  • Risk perceptions can refer to deliberative, affective, and experiential components.

  • These components can interactively influence health behaviors.

  • The formation of accurate risk perceptions has implications for health behaviors.

Risk perceptions  or an individual's perceived susceptibility to a threat  are a key component of many health behavior change theories. Risk perceptions are often targeted in health behavior change interventions, and recent meta-analytic evidence suggests that interventions that successfully engage and change risk perceptions produce subsequent increases in health behaviors. Here, we review recent literature on risk perceptions and health behavior, including research on the formation of risk perceptions, types of risk perceptions (including deliberative, affective, and experiential), accuracy of risk perceptions, and associations and interactions among types of risk perceptions. Taken together, existing research suggests that disease risk perceptions are a critical determinant of health behavior, although the nature of the association among risk perceptions and health behavior may depend on the profile of different types of risk perceptions and the accuracy of such perceptions.

Section snippets

Risk perceptions and health behavior

In health decision-making, individuals are expected to navigate choices involving weighing risk for consequences with benefits of action. Behaviors contributing to disease initiation and progression are often pleasurable (e.g., smoking or overeating). Motivation to forgo such pleasurable behaviors, or engage in inconvenient preventive behaviors, is believed to be driven to some extent by beliefs about the probability that a health consequence will occur [1], [2]. Correlational evidence supports

Formation of risk perceptions

A growing body of literature has probed how risk perceptions are formed. Although risk perceptions can be optimistic (i.e., low) or pessimistic (i.e., high), they are empirically and conceptually distinct from general dispositional optimism, in part because they are domain-specific [8]. Indeed, evidence suggests that, in the general population, individuals are able to differentiate among specific threats when forming risk perceptions [9]. Moreover, several studies suggest that dispositional and

Types of risk perceptions

Classic health behavior theories largely treat risk perceptions as deliberatively derived judgments, and research synthesized thus far has fit this conceptualization. Deliberative risk perceptions are systematic, logical, and rule-based [24], [25]. Theories that emphasize deliberative risk perceptions suggest that an individual relies on a number of reason-based strategies to derive an estimate of the likelihood that the negative outcome will occur. Deliberative risk perceptions are usually

Accuracy of risk perceptions

The formation of accurate  or inaccurate  risk perceptions may have important consequences for health. Although low risk perceptions are by definition optimistic, if an individual is indeed at low risk for a disease threat, those risk perceptions are also realistic. However, often individuals believe themselves to be at lower risk for outcomes than is warranted when examining their objective risk; this phenomenon is termed ‘unrealistic optimism’ [42]. Note that accuracy of risk perceptions

Associations and interactions among types of risk perceptions

Importantly, existing models do not directly address the possibility of a more complex interplay between deliberative and affective influences, despite the fact that evidence suggests that the strength of the associations among deliberative and affective components of risk perceptions may be as important as the absolute magnitudes of those constructs. For example, choice preference strength and readiness for action may be strongest among individuals when deliberative and affective perceptions

Concluding remarks

Health-related risk perceptions play an important role in motivating health behavior change [6••], and empirical evidence suggests that there are three distinct types of risk perceptions: deliberative, affective, and intuitive [38••], [39•], [40], [41]. Much is known about the formation of deliberative health-related risk perceptions, including the role of numeracy, previous experiences and salient instances of the threat, and emotion. Moreover, research has examined the implications of accurate

References and recommended reading

Papers of particular interest, published within the period of review, have been highlighted as:

  • • of special interest

  • •• of outstanding interest

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