Skin cancer risk assessment and the grammaticalization of the future: The role of epistemic modality when temporally framing health information

The way the future is grammaticalized in language may influence the way we think about future events. However, recent experimental investigations have led to suspicions that this relationship may not be driven by the future tense alone. Rather than simply considering whether a language uses the future tense to mark the future, it has been suggested that epistemic modality, which marks probability or likelihood, may contribute to this relationship. The notion of probability is applicable to research in health communication, as its goal is to effectively communicate health-relevant (future) outcomes. The aim of this study was to assess the role of grammaticalization of the future and epistemic modality in the context of effective health messages for skin cancer. Concretely, we conducted two experiments where we presented a total of 299 participants from the general population with narratives about fictional characters and their skin cancer risk related to their new job situation. These narratives varied in terms of verb tense and epistemic modality. Participants had to rate the perceived likelihood that the people described in the narratives would develop skin cancer. In Experiment 1 we assessed participants’ cognitive evaluation and in Experiment 2 we assessed participants’ affective evaluation of the likelihood of developing skin cancer. We found a main effect for epistemic modality when information was processed cognitively (Experiment 1) and a main effect for verb tense when information was processed affectively (Experiment 2). Our results indicate that the way we present health information in narratives may affect people’s perception of the likelihood of developing skin cancer. Further, we found evidence that affective evaluation may be connected to superficial information processing.