Immediate Affect, Enduring Cognition: Unraveling the Dual Pathways of Media’s Time-Varying Effects on Preventive Behaviors

Media attention plays a crucial role in shaping individual risk perceptions and health behaviors during health crises. However, extant research relying on cross-sectional data struggles to capture the temporal dynamics of media influence on preventive behaviors and the evolving mediating roles of affective and cognitive risk perceptions. To address this gap, this study proposed and empirically tested two alternative theoretical models: the affect-driven model and the cognition-driven model. Drawing on a three-wave panel survey conducted in Taiwan during the COVID-19 pandemic, our findings unveil a temporal sequencing effect. Specifically, the affect-driven model demonstrates stronger explanatory power in the short term, whereas the cognition-driven model emerges as dominant in the long term. This shift contributes to the ongoing theoretical debate regarding the interplay between affect and cognition while advancing our understanding of media's time-varying effects. The results suggest that public institutions and health campaigns should consider the temporal dynamics of media effects and tailor communication strategies to different stages to maximize media effectiveness and promote sustained behavioral change.