Increasing the cognitive availability of disease symptoms can increase
perceptions of vulnerability to a fictitious disease. Research findin
gs have also suggested that men and women respond differently to AIDS
information; nevertheless, prior research has failed to examine the ef
fects of imagery on both male and female perceptions of vulnerability
to a real disease, such as AIDS. Undergraduates were presented with sy
mptoms that were either hard to imagine or easy to imagine (labeled as
related to either AIDS or hyposcenia-B) that the students then read o
r imagined. The results, which replicated prior research, indicated th
at imagining disease symptoms altered the students' perceived vulnerab
ility to a fictitious disease. However, only imagery was significantly
related to perceived vulnerability to AIDS, and gender interacted wit
h this imagery process. Women expressed significant increases in perce
ived vulnerability when reading the disease symptoms, whereas men were
more vulnerable when imagining the disease symptoms than they were wh
en they read about the symptoms. The authors discuss the implications
of their research for the integration of theory and experimentation in
designing AIDS-intervention programs.