Zeek the Geek

Journal of Social and Clinical Psychology, Vol. 36, No. 2, 2017, pp. 158-169 158 Address correspondence to Steven S. Posavac, E. Bronson Ingram Professor of Marketing, Owen Graduate School of Business, 401 21 st Ave. S., Vanderbilt University, Nashville, TN 37203; E-mail: [email protected] ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY AND PERSUASION SUSCEPTIBILITY POSAVAC AND POSAVAC ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY DISORDER SYMPTOMOLOGY AND SUSCEPTIBILITY TO MARKETING PERSUASION STEVEN S. POSAVAC Vanderbilt University HEIDI D. POSAVAC Licensed Psychologist, Nashville, TN Research was conducted to explore if individuals with anxiety symptoms may be particularly susceptible to certain types of persuasion. Specifically, we focused on adult separation anxiety disorder, and hypothesized that individuals with rela- tively elevated symptoms would be differentially favorable to an advertisement if it contained an appeal to the concept of home. In an experiment, adult s\�eparation anxiety symptomology was measured among a nonclinical sample, and attitudes toward an advertisement that either contained or did not contain an appeal to home were measured. Consistent with hypotheses, individuals relatively high in adult separation anxiety symptoms were more favorable to the advertisement when it contained a home appeal, but those with no or relatively lower symptoms did not show this pattern. This research contributes by identifying a new conse- quence of anxiety symptoms: susceptibility to certain marketing themes. \�It may benefit individuals with adult separation anxiety symptoms to be aware that they may be overly vulnerable to marketing that contains themes of home, and clini- cians may be helpful in developing such insight.

Keywords: adult separation anxiety, persuasion, vulnerability Though anxiety researchers have long considered issues such as the etiology of anxiety disorders, differential diagnosis and di- © 2017 Guilford Publications, Inc. ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY AND PERSUASION SUSCEPTIBILITY 159 agnostic comorbidity, socio-emotional consequences of anxiety, and treatment efficacy (Milrod et al., 2016; Mroczkowski et al., 2016; Pini et al., 2014; Ross, Hood, & Short, 2016; Silove et al., 2015; Silove & Marnane, 2013), our research has a different focus:

whether exhibiting anxiety symptomology may make individu- als particularly susceptible to persuasive attempts, for example, by marketers. This is an important and actionable topic both for clinicians as well as individuals with anxiety. From the perspec- tive of the individual with anxiety, having an a priori under- standing of one’s vulnerabilities to certain types of manipulation may serve as a forewarning that inoculates against succumbing to undue influence (see Wood & Quinn, 2003, for a review of how forewarning persuasive content drives resistance to persuasion).

Accordingly, clinicians may serve their patients well if they can help facilitate the development of such insight.

Our article focuses specifically on adult separation anxiety.

The hallmark of adult separation anxiety is the excessive fear of being separated from those with whom an individual is at- tached (Boelen, Reijntjes, & Carleton, 2014; Bogels, Knappe, & Clark, 2013; Ollendick, Lease, & Cooper, 1993). Specific experi- ences include excessive distress when separation from home or attachment figures occurs or is anticipated, worry about an event that would lead to losing or being separated from an attachment figure, and reluctance and fear regarding being away from home (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). The lifetime incidence of adult separation anxiety disorder in the United States is es- timated to be 6.6% (Shear, Jin, Ruscio, Walters, & Kessler, 2006; see Silove et al., 2015, for international data), but a much higher percentage may experience sub-clinical symptomology. When individuals are in a state of anxiety they are typically motivated to seek amelioration of their distress (American Psy- chiatric Association, 2013; Battista, et al., 2015; Grant, et al., 2013). For example, Battista and colleagues (2015), conducted an experience survey among college students that corroborat- ed a tension-reduction theory narrative that individuals with social anxiety often consume alcohol to reduce the unpleasant experiences that accompany situations in which their anxiety is evoked (see also, Battisa, Stewart, & Ham, 2010). Sometimes in- dividuals’ responses to anxiety may be functional. For example, a student with anxiety regarding an upcoming exam may de- 160 POSA VAC AND POSAVAC vote extra hours to study. In other cases, responses to anxiety may be dysfunctional, for example, repeated checking behavior, avoidance, or self-medicating with alcohol or worse. In all of these examples, individuals approach what they perceive to be solutions that may relieve their distress. For individuals who are experiencing adult separation anxiety symptoms, the source of distress involves the worry about or perception of being away from home and the people important to them. Accordingly, as the agoraphobic avoids public places, the individual with adult separation anxiety symptoms will seek to reduce the distance, either physically or psychologically, from home and cherished others.

Given the motivation to feel close to home and important oth- ers that adult separation anxiety symptoms engender, we hy- pothesized that those with such symptoms may be particularly likely to respond to advertising that makes an appeal to the con- cept of being home. Such themes are common in advertising.

For example, both Jeep and Budweiser recently produced Super Bowl advertisements with coming home narratives, and Castle beer told the story of friends traveling across Africa and using the brand to try to locate an absent friend and bring him home.

We hypothesized that when individuals who are experiencing adult separation anxiety symptoms view an advertisement that contains (versus does not contain) a narrative or imagery of be- ing close to home, they may have a strong favorable reaction to the advertisement because it is closely aligned with their moti- vational proclivities. In contrast, we expected that home-themed advertising would not be differentially appealing compared to advertising without such a theme to those with no or low adult separation anxiety symptomology. To test our hypotheses, we conducted an experiment in which we measured adult separation anxiety symptoms among a non- clinical population, then randomly assigned participants to read an advertisement that either contained or did not contain a home-oriented theme. We anticipated that the extent of individ- uals’ adult separation anxiety symptoms would interact with the advertising theme such that when symptomology was absent or low, participants’ attitudes toward the advertisement would not differ as a function of the theme of the advertisement, but among ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY AND PERSUASION SUSCEPTIBILITY 161 participants with more symptomology, attitudes toward the ad- vertisement would be more favorable when the home theme ver- sus an alternate appeal was used.

METHOD PARTICIPANTS Two hundred sixteen undergraduates (110 females, 106 males) participated in the study in exchange for course credit, and com- pleted all measures in individual cubicles within Vanderbilt Uni- versity’s business school behavioral lab. This is a good sample for our purposes for two reasons. First, a nonclinical sample prevents the restriction of range problem that would result from using a clinical sample. Specifically, given that we hypothesized that individuals’ responses to advertising of different themes (i.e., whether the advertisement contains or does not contain an appeal regarding home), would differ according to their level of adult separation anxiety, it is important to observe the entire range of separation anxiety symptomology, including individu- als with either no or very low symptoms, who serve essentially as a control group. Second, because our theorizing suggests that those very high in adult separation anxiety may be most suscep- tible to being influenced by advertisements that contain a home appeal, demonstrating that this tendency occurs in a nonclinical sample provides a conservative test of our hypotheses.

PROCEDURE Upon arriving to the lab, participants were welcomed and, through written instructions, were informed that they would be participating in a study titled, Personality and Consumer Prefer - ences. After completing an informed consent form, participants read a set of general instructions that explained that they would be asked to respond to numerous items regarding their personal- ity and experiences. Then they would see a test internet banner advertisement and report what they thought about it. Partici- pants were further instructed that there were no right or wrong 162 POSA VAC AND POSAVAC answers to any of the questions, and that we were simply inter - ested in their honest opinions.

After finishing the initial instructions, participants completed the Severity Measure for Separation Anxiety Disorder—Adult (Craske, Wittchen, Stein, Andrews, & Lebeu, 2013), a ten-item self-report measure published by the American Psychiatric As- sociation for the use of researchers and clinicians. Individuals filling out the measure are instructed, “The following questions ask about thoughts, feelings, and behaviors that you may have had about being separated from home or from people who are important to you. Please rate how often the following statements are true for you,” and are then asked to indicate how often each of ten statements have been true for them during the past week.

Examples of items include, “During the past 7 days, I have felt a racing heart, sweaty, trouble breathing, faint, or shaky when sep- arated,” and, “During the past 7 days, I have avoided going to places where I would be separated.” Participants responded by indicating if each item was true for them in the past seven days “never,” “occasionally,” “half of the time,” “most of the time,” or “all of the time.” Responses were coded such that higher num- bers reflect more separation anxiety. After completing all of the items that measured adult separa- tion anxiety symptomology, participants engaged in a distractor task. The purpose of this task was to clear participants’ short- term memory of the separation anxiety items prior to viewing the advertisement. This task was titled, Consumer Tendencies Questionnaire, and consisted of items related to general con- sumer preference. Using identical anchors as used by the Sever - ity Measure for Separation Anxiety Disorder—Adult measure, participants were asked, for example, to answer items such as, “I consider several options before making a decision,” and “When I buy something, I choose a brand I know well.” When participants completed the distractor task, they next read instructions regarding the advertisement that they would be reading. Specifically, the instructions read:

On the next page you will see a test internet ad for an airline. The name of the airline has been disguised in the ad, and thus you will not \� ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY AND PERSUASION SUSCEPTIBILITY 163 recognize the name of the airline because it is fictitious. Please take\� a moment to look at the ad and read the text, and then please respond to the questions on the following pages by checking the box that best represents your opinion.

After reading these instructions, participants read an advertise- ment that was created for this study. The advertisement was os- tensibly for “Elation Airlines,” and featured a graphic of a young woman smiling and looking out the window of an airplane. We manipulated the text of the advertisement to create our experi- mental conditions. In the home theme present condition the text read, “Coming home to family . . . the best feeling in the world. . .” In the home theme absent condition the text read, “Seeing new things . . . the best feeling in the world. . .” Participants were ran- domly assigned to read either the home theme present or home theme absent version of the advertisement. Each advertisement contained a button that read “find a flight” to enhance realism.

When participants were done reading the advertisement, they completed items that measured their attitudes toward it (MacK- enzie & Lutz, 1989). Two seven-point Likert type items were used to measure participants’ attitudes. The first was “Overall, how much did you like the ad you saw?” and was anchored by “I liked it a lot” and “I didn’t like it at all.” The second wa\�s “What is your opinion about the ad you saw?” which was anchored by “Extremely favorable” and “Extremely unfavorable.” For the purposes of analyses, participants’ responses were coded from one to seven, with higher numbers indicating more positive at- titudes toward the advertisement. To control for individual differences, after individuals report- ed their attitudes toward the advertisement, we asked them to indicate how relevant an advertisement for airline travel is to them personally. This item was anchored by Extremely relevant and Not at all relevant. Finally we asked participants’ gender, and conducted a suspicion check by asking participants to write a brief description of their understanding of the purpose of the study. After completing the suspicion check, participants were debriefed and excused. 164 POSA VAC AND POSAVAC RESULTS Responses to the suspicion check item were examined to iden- tify if any participants were able to guess the experimental hy- potheses. We took a very liberal approach in identifying suspi- cion such that any participants who perceived that the study involved a link between separation and evaluations or percep- tions of the advertising were flagged, even if the suspicion was quite opaque (e.g., “To study consumer behavior and preference of advertisements relative to other metrics—feelings about sepa- ration, etc.”), or a participant proposed a relationship opposite of the actual hypotheses. Using these criteria, thirteen partici- pants expressed at least some rudimentary suspicion, six in the home theme present condition, seven in the home theme absent condition. We first conducted all of the analyses with the com- plete data set, and then reran the analyses excluding these par - ticipants. Both sets of analyses were almost identical with regard to significance levels, completely identical regarding interpreta- tions, and accordingly all of the reported analyses are based on the complete data set.

We first analyzed the psychometric properties of the Severity Measure for Separation Anxiety Disorder—Adult. Consistent with Crask et al. (2013), the ten items constituted a solitary con- struct, as evidenced by Cronbach’s alpha = .84, and accordingly the items were aggregated for the purposes of subsequent analy- ses. The two items used to measure attitudes toward the adver - tisement also measured a single construct, r = .83, so these items were also combined. To explore how adult separation anxiety and advertising theme affect attitudes toward an advertisement, we regressed participants’ opinion about the advertisement on the aggregate measure of separation anxiety, advertisement theme (dummy coded), and the interaction between separation anxiety and ad- vertisement theme. The regression model demonstrated that sig- nificant variability in advertising attitudes was explained by the predictor variables, R 2 = .05, F(3,212) = 3.59, p = .014. The critical analysis for our purposes is the interaction between separation anxiety and advertising theme. Consistent with our hypotheses, the interaction was significant, b = −1.027, t(212) = −2.40, p = .017. ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY AND PERSUASION SUSCEPTIBILITY 165 Thus, the relative effectiveness of the advertising theme was de- pendent on participants’ level of separation anxiety symptomol- ogy (the nature of this effect is explored in the subsequent para- graph). There was neither a significant main effect of advertising theme, b = 1.019, t(212) = 1.65, p = .1, nor of separation anxiety, b = .57, t(212) = 1.68, p = .1, on advertising attitudes. To explore the nature of the interaction, we conducted spotlight analyses (Aiken & West, 1991; Fitzsimons, 2008; Irwin & McClel- land, 2001; Krishna, 2016). The first regression was conducted by transforming the separation anxiety data by subtracting the mean and standard deviation from the original scores, then re- gressing attitudes toward the advertisement on this transformed variable, the advertising theme dummy, and the interaction be- tween transformed separation anxiety and advertising theme.

This analysis puts a spotlight on participants high in separation anxiety, and shows that for these participants, there was a sig- nificant effect of advertising theme, b = −.862, t(212) = 3.23, p = .001, such that attitudes toward the advertisement were more favorable in the home theme present versus home theme absent condition. The second regression was conducted by transform- ing the separation anxiety data by subtracting the mean from, and adding the standard deviation to, the original scores, then performing a similar regression using the new transformation of separation anxiety, advertisement theme dummy, and the inter - action between the new transformation of separation anxiety and advertising theme as predictors. This analysis puts a spotlight on participants low in adult separation anxiety symptomology, and shows that for these participants, there was no significant effect of advertising theme, b = .047, t(212) = .18, n.s. Thus, con- sistent with our hypotheses, individuals high in adult separation anxiety disorder symptomology were particularly susceptible to the advertising theme that appealed to home, whereas advertis- ing theme was unrelated to advertising attitudes for individuals with no and lower symptomology. We reran the analyses including participants’ rating of the rel- evance of the advertisement to them as a predictor to determine if this individual difference interacted with the results. When rel- evance was included in the regression analysis, it was unsurpris- ingly positively related to advertisement attitudes (those who 166 POSA VAC AND POSAVAC rated an advertisement for airline travel as being more person- ally relevant generally liked the advertisement they saw more), but inclusion did not change any of the relationships that we reported.

DISCUSSION Research on anxiety disorders, and in clinical psychology and psychiatry more generally, tends to focus on causes and the ex- periential consequences of maladies, as well as prevention and remediation. Our article focuses on how the presence of anxiety symptoms may be associated with vulnerability to certain types of persuasion. Specifically, individuals in our experiment who experienced relatively higher adult separation anxiety disorder symptomology reported more favorable attitudes toward adver - tising that contained the theme of home compared to advertising that did not. In contrast, individuals with low or no adult separa- tion anxiety disorder did not exhibit this differential responsive- ness to home-themed advertising.

Our findings may suggest an opportunity for marketers, but may simultaneously reflect a threat to those who suffer from adult separation anxiety disorder. Marketers are quite adept at understanding drivers of attitudes and decision making, and cre- ating advertising materials that persuade and affect the buying behavior of their consumer targets. Advances in analytics and Big Data are only serving to increase marketers’ power to craft appeals that are likely to hit consumers’ soft spots and drive their behavior (e.g., Arthur, 2013). For example, a common practice in marketing is to divide the population into subgroups according to their proclivities to purchase certain goods and services. One such segment often targeted by marketers is (perhaps crassly) re- ferred to as hypochondriacs—those with chronic health-related anxiety who are accordingly likely to respond to the promotion of over-the-counter medicines and devices (Berkowitz, 2017).

Our findings suggest that individuals with adult separation anx- iety disorder symptoms would be quite susceptible to marketing that uses narratives of being or returning home. To the extent that marketers’ data machines can find covariates or behavioral markers of adult separation anxiety (e.g., purchases made, web ADULT SEPARATION ANXIETY AND PERSUASION SUSCEPTIBILITY 167 sites visited), such individuals could be directly targeted with home-themed advertising. Although such a strategy may drive sales, whether this would be a good thing for those with adult separation anxiety is another matter entirely. Importantly, our research suggests a vulnerability to persua- sion among those with adult separation anxiety disorder symp- toms that goes beyond simply the appeal of a product itself; fea- turing the concept of home as an advertising theme leads to more favorability towards the persuasive attempt. Indeed, even in our nonclinical sample, individuals with more adult separation anxi- ety symptomology were particularly responsive to advertising that contained the theme of home. The student sample we used in this study provides a conservative test of our hypotheses. In- deed, among a population with clinically significant adult sepa- ration anxiety, we suspect that the vulnerability to advertising that makes a home appeal would be all the more pronounced. Another feature of our research, that may have resulted in our effects being less pronounced than we would expect to observe in actual marketplace contexts, is that our research used a brief one-time exposure to an advertisement, and thus participants’ responses were driven solely by consideration of the content of the advertisement. In real world persuasion contexts, repeated exposures to an advertisement may kick off a classical condi- tioning process where a brand may come to be associated sub- consciously with the concept of home. Thus, being exposed to a home-themed advertisement multiple times, or a campaign fea- turing several similar themed advertisements, may be particular - ly impactful on those with adult separation disorder symptoms because the brand would come to evoke thoughts of home when encountered in purchase contexts (e.g., in stores, or online). Given that our research demonstrated a vulnerability to home themed advertising in a one-time exposure among those in a nonclinical sample with relatively higher separation anxiety symptomology, a clinician treating a client diagnosed with adult separation anxiety disorder may wish to consider if helping the client to achieve insight into this particular vulnerability would be wise. If a client gains an understanding of how she or he may have the potential to respond to a given marketing theme, the client may be armed and able to counter-argue such messages 168 POSA VAC AND POSAVAC when they are encountered (Xu & Wyer, 2012). Whether in in- dividual treatment sessions, or with a psychoeducational ap- proach (for an example of the use of psychoeducation to prevent media-induced weight related anxiety, see Posavac, Posavac, & Weigel, 2001), individuals experiencing chronic adult separation anxiety may be well served by clinicians who help to inoculate them against the possibility of coming under undue influence by savvy marketers.

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