Do Hedonic Motives Moderate Regulatory Focus Motives? Evidence from the Framing of Persuasive Messages

Research on regulatory focus has established a regulatory matching effect : The persuasiveness of a message is enhanced when regulatory orientations of message and perceiver match (i.e., both are promotion or both are prevention). We report evidence that varying the hedonic outcome reverses this effect. We manipulated hedonic outcome by explicitly stating pleasurable versus painful outcomes as part of the message frame as well as by priming perceivers to focus on either pleasurable or painful outcomes. When both message and perceiver were focused on pleasurable outcomes, we replicated the regulatory matching effect. However, the matching effect reversed when the hedonic outcome of the message was opposed to that of the perceiver (i.e., one was pleasurable and the other painful). Under these conditions, messages that mismatched the perceivers