Sustainable dietary choices have become increasingly important because of the current environmental threats the world is facing. Nonetheless, consumers find it difficult to assess a product’s sustainability and therefore make better choices. This pilot study tested whether explanatory product information about sustainability increased sustainable purchases in an online supermarket and whether additional health information increased message effectiveness. Perceived consumer effectiveness (i.e., the perception of the degree to which individual actions can contribute to environmental problems) and green skepticism were hypothesized to mediate the effect of message type, and environmental attitudes were included as the moderator. An experiment using a one-factor design was conducted among 101 participants who were assigned to one of three experimental conditions: sustainability claim only, explanatory sustainability claim, and explanatory sustainability and health claim. Analyses showed that an explanatory sustainability claim (regardless of whether this claim was accompanied by a health claim) led to fewer sustainable purchases through perceived consumer effectiveness but only for those with low environmental attitudes. No effects were found for the addition of a health claim. The results from this pilot provide insight for future studies that aim to examine how online supermarkets should communicate to increase sustainable purchases.

Virtual reality technologies can be used to alter one’s body image by inducing ownership of an overweight virtual body. This illusion can possibly lead to both negative affective responses toward the virtual body as well as perceptual changes of one’s own body size, which are both scarcely examined with regard to the embodiment of an overweight avatar. This study’s fundamental aim is to investigate, among healthy weight participants, whether negative affect toward a virtual body and changes in body-size perception can be evoked when embodying an overweight virtual avatar. Additionally, the study investigates whether applying visuotactile stimulation (which has been identified as a proxy for virtual body ownership by previous studies) and drive for thinness influence the strength of these effects. A 2 (healthy weight vs. overweight virtual body) × 2 (congruent vs. incongruent visuotactile stimulation) between-subjects design was employed, with participants’ drive for thinness measured to test its potential moderating effect. ANOVAs revealed that participants (N = 114) experienced significantly more negative affect toward the virtual body when embodying one that was overweight compared to a healthy weight virtual body. Visuotactile stimulation did not moderate this effect, even though the manipulation of visuotactile stimulation worked as intended (i.e., the experience of ownership over the virtual body was significantly higher in the congruent compared to incongruent visuotactile stimulation condition). Additionally, participants with a high drive for thinness did not experience significantly more negative affect than participants with a low drive for thinness. Embodiment of an overweight avatar did not affect body-size perceptions, nor did visuotactile stimulation or the drive for thinness moderate this effect. Knowing that embodiment of an overweight avatar results in negative affective responses toward it, future studies could deepen our understanding of the role of negative affect in the transfer of emotions to one’s own body, and the interplay between negative affect toward a virtual body and body-size perceptions.

As avatars gain prominence in health-promoting applications, understanding how health-related avatar appearance characteristics could affect users' behavior is crucial. Drawing upon the Proteus effect, avatars can positively and negatively affect health behaviors, depending on whether the avatar appearance is aligned with stereotypes about healthy or unhealthy behavior. Investigating avatar appearances is essential to understand potential negative health effects. Three experiments in a non-immersive virtual supermarket examined whether controlling an overweight avatar negatively affected 1) intentions to eat healthy and 2) food choice healthiness in the virtual supermarket, thereby investigating avatar allocation type (Study 1) and visual perspective (Study 2) as moderators. 2 (Avatar body size: overweight vs. healthy weight) by 2 (Avatar allocation type: self-assigned vs. experimenter-assigned [Study 1]; Visual perspective: first-person vs. third-person [Studies 2 and 3]) between-subjects designs were employed. None of the studies demonstrated the Proteus effect and no moderating role of avatar allocation type was found (Study 1). Unexpectedly, controlling an overweight avatar resulted in stronger intentions to eat healthy from a third-person perspective only (Study 2), which led to the hypothesis that the overweight avatar functioned as a fear stimulus. To test this, a health message was added that highlighted obesity as a health risk (Study 3). The addition of this message did not affect intentions to eat healthy and food choice healthiness. The combination of fear appeal and self-perception theory as explanatory frameworks for behavioral responses to avatars opens avenues for new research, such as exploring specific conditions that trigger each effect.