Mediators of the Relationship between Self-Affirmation and Defensive Responding
Open AccessSelf-affirmation has been shown to reduce defensive responding to threatening health messages. However, one shortcoming of the existing literature is that the mechanisms responsible for reduced defensive responding that results from self-affirmation are not known. Another shortcoming is that no research has tested whether different self-affirmation tasks operate in identical ways. Thus, one objective of the study was to test whether self-integrity and love/connectedness mediated the relationship between self-affirmation and reduced defensive responding to a threatening health message about smoking cigarettes. A second objective was to test whether two of the most commonly used self-affirmation tasks (i.e., values affirmation task and kindness affirmation task) both activated self-integrity and love/connectedness or whether one task more strongly elicited one of the proposed mediators than the other. Adult smokers (N = 265) were recruited using Amazon Mechanical Turk. Data were collected on-line. Participants were randomly assigned to complete a values affirmation task, a kindness affirmation task, or a control task before reading a threatening health message about smoking cigarettes. Results were restricted to those who were not unmotivated to quit smoking. Results showed that self-integrity, but not love/connectedness mediated the relationship between the values affirmation condition and defensive responding. Results also showed that neither love/connectedness or self-integrity mediated the relationship between the kindness affirmation condition and defensive responding. Results imply that self-affirmation tasks operate differently and should not be considered interchangeable.
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