Many people know that looking after their mental health is good for them, but few act on it. Health messages try to tip the balance, often by stressing either what you gain or what you avoid losing. A new experiment from Hong Kong suggests that messages stressing the benefits of self-care raise people’s intentions to do it, though the effects were small.

Researchers at the Chinese University of Hong Kong and the Hong Kong Polytechnic University recruited 384 participants through social media and a university mass email. The findings appear in BMC Psychology. Each person read one of three messages: a gain-framed message stressing the benefits of self-care, a nonloss-framed message stressing the distress that self-care can prevent, or a control message unrelated to self-care.

Participants then reported their intention to practise self-care, and had the chance to take up and use mindfulness audio. Uptake and engagement were measured straight away and again after one week. The team also tested whether two individual traits changed the effect: regulatory focus, and how likely people thought their mental health was to worsen.

Gain framing emphasises what a person stands to gain, such as feeling calmer. Nonloss framing emphasises avoiding a bad outcome, such as distress. Regulatory focus is a person’s general leaning towards pursuing gains or avoiding losses.

Gain-framed messages produced higher intention to practise self-care than the control message, and the advantage over nonloss framing was suggestive rather than firm. There was tentative evidence that people in the nonloss group played the mindfulness audio for longer than the control group. People who saw themselves at lower risk of worsening mental health showed higher intention after gain framing than after either other message.

Regulatory focus made no clear difference. The researchers had expected people oriented towards gains to respond to gain messages, and those oriented towards avoiding loss to respond to nonloss messages, as has been found in some physical health studies. That pattern did not appear, and no other outcomes showed evidence that the traits changed the effect.

Given the lack of significant effects, the authors conclude that tailoring messages by regulatory focus is not supported for encouraging mental health self-care. They recommend field studies, longitudinal designs and larger trials able to detect very small effects.

The study has clear limits. It was an online experiment with volunteers, so the sample may not represent the wider public, and the effects it found were very small. Intention is not the same as behaviour, and the follow-up covered only one week. Some of the stronger-looking results were described by the authors as tentative.

Earlier work has used framing to encourage healthy habits, mostly in physical health. This study suggests that benefit-focused wording may help a little with mental health self-care, while personalised matching has yet to prove its worth.