Seeing is believing? The pivotal role of personal experience in contemporary health behaviour: A narrative review

In the age of people aspiring after sense experiences, encouraging long-term health behaviour changes to prevent future disorders that are, without previous personal experiences, unimaginable threats for the public, maybe one of the greatest challenges preventive medicine has to face. In order to become trusted sources, and influence public health behaviour in an experience-oriented manner, we need to formulate strategies offering emotionally evocative sense inputs that elicit self-relatedness. The current narrative review discusses the relevance of personal experiences in contemporary health behaviour by focusing on three major areas: 1) the importance of personal sources of health-related information, 2) cognitive and neurobiological background of personal experiences, 3) potential strategies to induce health behaviour changes through personal experiences. Based on the reviewed body of knowledge, three potential “rules” are proposed to increase the effectiveness of health promotion programs through sense or personal experiences: 1) Rule of Senses (stressing the importance of multisensory learning); 2) Rule of Affect (emphasizing the motivational significance of evoking positive emotions); and 3) Rule of Self-relatedness (highlighting the role of the self-referential composition of human experiences).