The increasing prevalence of obese and overweight people is associated with a concomitant decrease in health. Physical activity is associated with improvements in health, including weight loss. Health promotion campaigns are a common tool to influence health behavior. These campaigns rely on messages that persuade people to adopt the message's recommendations. Many of these campaigns use emotional appeals. The ‘scare tactic' has been a popular means to influence behavior. A closer examination of these scare tactics reveals that they often include the use of disgusting images. The use of these images has been hypothesized to increase the perceived severity of the unhealthy behavior and subsequently increase the amount of fear experienced. However, fear and disgust are different emotions. Disgust is a strong motivator of behavior. Further, disgust can attract and repel attention and influence social norms. The simultaneous use of disgusting images in a fear message has confounded which emotional reaction is the primary cause of behavior change. With research on the effects of emotions on health promotion one would assume that a prerequisite is that we know the individual and combined effects of emotions on behavior. This information could have direct implications for recommendations to practitioners on the way to construct a health promotion message. This study examined the effects of emotion—inducing messages on physical activity. Specifically, disgust, fear, and their interaction were investigated. Participants were university employees (n=156). Participants read either a fearful or non—fearful message promoting physical activity. The messages contained one of two disgusting images, or a neutral image. Self—report physical activity was collected prior to, shortly after, and 16 days after reading the brochure. A 3 (image) x 2 (message) x 3 (time point) with repeated measures on the last factor MANCOVA was performed on self—report physical activity behavior. Results indicated that highly disgusting images increase reported vigorous physical activity. There were no interactions of disgust and fear, indicating that these emotions are distinct and persuade differently. This is an important finding because it questions whether “fear” messages that use disgusting images are actually “fear” messages. Future research on emotional health promotion messages need to clarify which emotion is evoked from these types of messages. This has direct implications for recommendations to practitioners. In this study a major practical implication is that disgust evoking messages, not the traditional fear evoking message, can increase physical activity. Keyword(s): exercise/fitness/physical activity, health promotion, marketing/public relations