Self-affirmation and self-control: counteracting defensive processing of health information and facilitating health behavior change

Accepting personally relevant health information and successfully changing one’s health behavior accordingly is valuable for long-term health and wellbeing. However, both steps pose different self-control dilemmas. It is no surprise, therefore, that people may resist health information and maintain unhealthy behavior. In this chapter, we consider the problem of responding adaptively to health risk information from a self-control perspective, and discuss how a self-affirmation intervention (that typically requires people to reflect on their important personal values or attributes) may improve self-control in the context of health information processing and health behavior change.