The Effects of Varying Electronic Cigarette Warning Label Design Features On Attention, Recall, and Product Perceptions Among Young Adults

ABSTRACT This study was a 3 (Brand: Blu, MarkTen, Vuse) by 3 (Warning Size: 20%, 30%, or 50% of advertisement surface) by 2 (Warning Background: White, Red) experimental investigation of the effects of electronic cigarette (e-cigarette) warning label design features. Young adults aged 18–30 years (n = 544) were recruited online, completed demographic and tobacco use history measures, and randomized to view e-cigarette advertisements with warning labels that varied by the experimental conditions. Participants completed a task assessing self-reported visual attention to advertisements with a-priori regions of interest defined around warning labels. Warning message recall and perceived addictiveness of e-cigarettes were assessed post-exposure. Approximately half of participants reported attending to warning labels and reported attention was greater for warnings on red versus white backgrounds. Recall of the warning message content was also greater among those reporting attention to the warning label. Overall, those who viewed warnings on red backgrounds reported lower perceived addictiveness than those who viewed warnings on white backgrounds, and e-cigarette users reported lower perceived addictiveness than non-users. Among e-cigarette users, viewing warnings on white backgrounds produced perceptions more similar to non-users. Greater recall was significantly correlated with greater perceived addictiveness. This study provides some of the first evidence that e-cigarette warning label design features including size and coloring affect self-reported attention and content recall.

• Publication year

  2019

• Venue

  Health Communication

• Publication date

  2019-02-23

• Fields of study

  Medicine, Psychology

• Identifiers
  DOI 10.1080/10410236.2017.1372050PMID 29236529PMCID PMC5999554
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar, PubMed

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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