Grant: Project Grant

A lot of time and money is spent to create messages that try to educate women about heart disease. These messages also give information about heart healthy behaviors like being more active. Most of these messages talk about the health benefits of exercise and suggest things like setting goals to help women be more active. Women with heart disease tell us the messages can make them feel guilty, that they caused their own sickness. The emotions we feel are very important and influence what we choose to do. Researchers have suggested that messages should deliberately try to make women feel good about being active, even if they already have heart disease. This research will try to do that. The first thing we will do is create messages that try to make women with and without heart disease feel good about being active. We will ask women to comment on the messages and will change the messages based on the comments. We will test if the new messages make women feel better (for example, happier or less stressed) than messages that talk about why being active is good for you. Those messages also ask women to set goals and that can be hard for them. We will see if the women who read the emotional messages move more compared to women who read the other messages. This research tests what women think about existing heart disease prevention messages. If the new messages cause positive emotional responses then maybe heart healthy behaviours will also change. This research may impact the health of women with and without heart disease because physical activity is good for most people. If successful, this study design can also test messages about other things like smoking and diet. It might seem like a small change in how heart disease is talked about, but many people and groups can use the results. In that way, many people can be positively affected.