Health Promotion Through Mass Media

People adopt behavioral patterns consistent with events observed in their environments, including television portrayals. Although television programs frequently portray unhealthy styles of living, a vast potential exists for people to learn healthy patterns of behavior from media presentations. The purpose of this article is to examine interactions between the person and television that capitalize upon environmental features associated with healthy life styles. In particular, we advance the hypothesis that people act upon media messages which advocate healthy life styles when they perceive the messages as personally relevant and when they believe that they can translate those messages into personal actions. The challenge for the television medium is to present content about healthy life styles in a manner that people can understand, remember, and which motivates them to act--either by altering unhealthy patterns of living (intervention) or by refusing to partake in these patterns in the first place (prevention).