Background: A well-studied internal barrier to regular physical activity, and more specifically brisk walking, is cognitive fatigue. However, thus far little research examined how cognitively fatigued individuals can be motivated to exercise, more specifically to engage in brisk walking. This study investigates whether humorous intervention messages might be an effective strategy to motivate cognitively fatigued individuals to brisk walk, and through which underlying processes.
Methods: An online experiment was performed in which variation in cognitive fatigue was induced through mental arithmetic questions. Afterwards, participants (n = 250) recruited through Prolific, randomly received either humorous or non-humorous intervention messages related to brisk walking. Potential mediators of the relations between physical activity, humour and cognitive fatigue were measured, were self-efficacy, self-control, and motivation.
Results: First, regression analyses confirmed that cognitive fatigue negatively influences brisk walking intentions and that the perceived humour of the intervention messages moderated this relationship. Second, results showed that self-control and self-efficacy are mediators explaining the relationship between cognitive fatigue and brisk walking intentions. Lastly, this study found that perceived humour of the intervention messages moderated the relationship between cognitive fatigue and self-control, indicating that perceptions of self-control were positively changed after receiving messages that were perceived as humorous compared to messages that were not perceived as humorous, subsequently increasing brisk walking intentions.
Conclusions: This study is the first to unravel the underlying relationship between humorous intervention messages and brisk walking intentions through positive changes in perceptions of self-control within a cognitively fatigued sample. Results of this study suggest that existing smartphone applications monitoring and promoting brisk walking should integrate tailored message strategies within their cues to brisk walk by implementing humour as a strategy to motivate users when they are cognitively fatigued.
Keywords: Brisk Walking Intentions.; Cognitive Fatigue.; Humorous intervention messages.; Self-Control.; Smartphone Application..
© 2024. The Author(s).