Cognitive and emotional factors in health behaviour: Dual-process reasoning, cognitive styles and optimism as predictors of healthy lifestyle, healthy behaviours and medical adherence

Abstract

Although it is today commonly accepted that cognitive and emotional factors interact in guiding decisions and behaviour in various domains, including medical and health related decision making, the interaction between these factors remains unclear. Within this study we explored the associations between individuals’ health behaviours with different cognitive and emotional factors. In doing so, we focused on three domains important for health outcomes that include leading a healthy everyday lifestyle, engagement in healthy behaviours and medical adherence. As predictors, we used cognitive reflection and heuristics tasks for assessing individuals’ ability to engage in rational thinking, cognitive styles that included need for cognition, faith in intuition and maximization to assess their motivation to engage in such thinking, optimism as an emotional indicator and trust and satisfaction with health provider as a final factor hypothesized to influence behaviour. The obtained results showed that all three assessed domains were associated with individuals’ cognitive and emotional factors. Specifically, leading a healthy everyday lifestyle was predicted by maximizing, optimism and trust and satisfaction with health provider. Next, healthy behaviours were predicted by maximizing, optimism and ability to override heuristic and biased thinking, whereas higher need for cognition and trust and satisfaction with health provider predicted medical adherence. These results extend previous reports and provide novel insights into the contributions of various aspects of cognitive and emotional factors for specific domains of health behaviour.