Measuring Affective Attitudes towards Health Among Adolescents

Abstract

Introduction

Affective attitudes play a significant role in health behaviors. However, comparing to cognitive attitudes, affective attitudes are much less investigated.

Objectives

To study affective attitudes towards health among adolescents, we measured associations between words related to health and positive/negative emotions.

Aims

We used the modified Etkind Color Test (Etkind, 1980) as a new measure of affective attitudes.

Methods

Subjects (n = 79, Mage = 14.34 ± 1.21, 35 males) ranked 8 colors from Lüscher's color test (1971) from best to least associated with each of 13 words related to health (e.g. sport, risky behaviors) and 6 words related to positive and negative emotions. To calculate an association between an emotion and a health-related word we used a scoring algorithm, similar to Palmer's and colleagues MCA score (Palmer et al., 2013).

Results

Means of associations between words and positive emotions were assessed: my body (0.74 ± 2.02), environment (1.17 ± 1.82), eating (1.23 ± 1.98), health (1.60 ± 1.78), risky behaviors (−1.14 ± 2.14), family (2.13 ± 2.00), sport (2.02 ± 1.86), sleep (0.74 ± 1.85), school stress (−0.95 ± 1.89), hygiene (0.91 ± 1.85), medicine (0.61 ± 1.95), psychological well-being (1.11 ± 2.24), illness (−0.43 ± 1.39). Positive emotions had inverse relation with risk behaviors, illness and school stress and direct relation with the rest 10 factors.

All correlations between negative and positive attitudes towards health related words were significant and negative (−.223 < r < 559), except two (medicine and illness).

Conclusions

The modified Etkind Color Test describes semantic space of affective attitudes towards health. It showed that adolescents mostly did not have ambivalent attitudes towards health related factors.

Disclosure of interest

The authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.