The current studies aimed to understand the role of anxiety in information processing and management behaviors through the lens of the Risk Perception Attitude framework with two separate experiments. The first study aimed to examine the role of anxiety on information processing and management intention based on the RPA framework with the nationally representative sample. To further understand how anxious people pay attention and seek information, the laboratory experiment was conducted as the second study utilizing physiological measures with only the RPA’s anxious segment - people with high perceived risk and low perceived efficacy for our study contexts of type 2 diabetes and energy blackouts. The findings from these studies reveal that anxiety, influenced by risk perception and efficacy beliefs, was associated with information processing (i.e., systematic processing and heuristic processing) and risk information seeking intentions for energy blackouts. However, no significant relationship was found between anxiety and the information seeking intention or processing variables in the context of type 2 diabetes. The findings from Study 2 indicated that people with high risk perception and low efficacy beliefs had tendency to prioritize risk information over information about preventive behaviors. Implications for risk communication and theory were addressed.
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