ABSTRACT

Health risk behaviors can potentially damage health and include smoking, sunbathing without protection, smoking and having high-fat, high-sugar and/or high-salt diets. The chapter reviews the application of the theory of planned behavior to health risk behaviors and then overviews the prototype-willingness model which was designed specifically to predict risk behaviors. The importance of affective influences – including affective attitudes, anticipated affect and stress – plus implicit influences on health risk behaviors are also highlighted. The chapter illustrates work indicating how different types of persuasive messages based on message framing, self-affirmation or social norms can change health risk behaviors. We then show how these behaviors can also be changed via changes in affective attitudes and/or anticipated affect, as well as illustrating the important role of more automatic processes (attentional bias; automatic approach tendencies; implicit attitudes; priming) on health risk behaviors.