Young Adults’ Responses to Environmental Risk in Social Advertising: Hormonal Correlates; Consumer Behaviour and Environmental Attitudes
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15611/pn.2026.3.03Keywords:
social advertising, negative emotions, stress biomarkers, environmental behaviourAbstract
Aim: This study aimed to examine whether exposure to an environmentally themed advertisement eliciting strong negative emotions triggers short-term changes in salivary steroid hormones (cortisol, testosterone, DHEA) and whether these hormonal responses are associated with pro-environmental attitudes and ethically minded consumer behaviour.
Methodology: The research was conducted in two stages. First, a pretest (N = 139) was used to identify the environmental video advertisement perceived as the most emotionally negative. Second, a single--group quasi-experiment (N = 22) was conducted in which saliva samples were collected five minutes before and five minutes after the exposure. Hormonal concentrations were assessed using ELISA, while environmental attitudes and consumer behaviour were measured with the New Environmental Paradigm (NEP) scale and the Ethically Minded Consumer Behaviour (EMCB) scale.
Results: The advertisement produced significant hormonal changes among men, including a decrease in cortisol and the cortisol/DHEA ratio, and an increase in the testosterone/cortisol ratio. No significant hormonal changes were observed among women. Post-pre hormonal differences were significantly related to selected NEP dimensions and EMCB components, including recycling and willingness to pay more for ethical products.
Implications and recommendations: The findings suggest that physiological markers may help evaluate emotional risk processing in environmental communication and support gender-sensitive campaign design. Future research should test larger samples and examine whether hormonal responses predict long-term behavioural change. Given the exploratory nature of the study, the small sample size, and the single-group design, the results should be interpreted as preliminary and should be confirmed.
Originality/value: The article offers a novel psychophysiological perspective on environmental advertising by integrating hormonal biomarkers with environmental attitudes and ethical consumer behavior.
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Copyright (c) 2026 Grzegorz Godlewski, Mirosław Zalech, Adam Augustyniak, Jakub Rybka
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Accepted 2026-07-21
Published 2026-10-07
