Differing motives in a particular situation shapes reactions and perceptions of the experience. To help settle the debate, Albarracin and her colleagues conducted what they believe to be the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date. Thus, it is reasonable to imagine that fear-evoking narrativeswhether in the media or told by parentsare effective vehicles for persuading children, perhaps even more so than didactic fear-based messages. However, the resources listed below are helpful places to start exploring these topics as they are addressed in the academic literature. Given that many health-oriented fear appeals have been shown to evoke multiple emotions, including anger, disgust, and sadness, current theorizing has taken a mixed-emotions or emotional flow perspective to provide a deeper understanding of fear appeal effects. Further, of the studies that do measure fear, they tend to do so in very limited ways, typically self-report of emotional arousal in response to the message generally. Ukraine war latest: Boy, 6, cries as sister killed in Russian attack However, this approach offers a limited understanding of the experience of fear throughout message exposure. By the 1990s, Kim Wittes extended parallel process model (EPPM) gained traction, and her 1992 piece in the journal Communication Monographs that first proposes the model is a good place to start understanding this perspective. Describe the "fear appeal" and how it's used in public health messaging This Perspective discusses the use of fear appeals in promoting health behaviour. This is a critical because if audiences stop paying attention to a fear appeal after the presentation of the threat, they may miss out on the efficacy information that is critical to a fear-based messages success. Indeed, the Tannenbaum et al. Fear, in turn, motivates protective behavior and a strong desire to escape the threat. There is growing evidence in multiple media contexts, including health messages (e.g., Dunlop, Wakefield, & Kashima, 2010) that the emotionality of media messages, regardless of valence, is associated with their diffusing through social networks. However, if efficacy appraisals are strong enough to dominate threat appraisals, the EPPM predicts that individuals will feel capable of addressing the threat and will then enact adaptive, danger-control behaviors. As the field of psychology shifted to emphasize cognition over motivation through the 1960s into the 1970s, the study of fear appeals followed suit, with the theories developed during this timeframe highlighting the cognitions associated with the experience of fear, as well as the link between those cognitions and attitude change. Describe the "fear appeal" and how it's used in public health messaging Yet fears associated motivation for protection from the threat may still lead to message processing, depending on the audiences expectations regarding the remainder of the message content. Thus, as research on fear appeals moves forward, it is important to give greater consideration not only to how such messages are processed in situ but also how those messages are shared and discussed within social networks, both interpersonally and online. Fear appeals motivate attitude, intention, and behaviour changesespecially fear appeals accompanied by high-efficacy messages. Empirical research, however, did not readily support the predicted curvilinear relationship between fear arousal and influence. These emotions may also have an effect on behavioral changes. Still, the CFM introduces the notion that the emotion of fear influences how carefully persuasive messages are processed, which in turn has implications for the direction and endurance of persuasive effect. In light of the limitations of previous theorizing, and coinciding with an increased interest in affect and emotion in the psychology literature (Lazarus, 1991), Witte (1992) proposed the extended parallel process model (EPPM). Research has continued to rely heavily on the EPPM, and a special issue of the journal Health Communication in 2013 highlighted the contributions of this model to research over the past two decades. Int J Environ Res Public Health. sharing sensitive information, make sure youre on a federal This paper provides an insight into the use of fear appeals to communicate a public health message. Fear appeals are more effective for women because women tend to be more prevention-focused than men. Additionally, Tannenbaum et al. Hovland, Janis, and Kelly noted that habituated behaviors can be adaptive in that they target the threat itself and aim to reduce or eliminate it. Generally, the findings reveal that fear appeals do work; however, more specific results were also discovered (Tannenbaum et al, 2015). Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice). However, despite anecdotal evidence that physicians communication may trigger fear in patients for the purpose of motivating behavior change or compliance, the intentional use of fear-based messages in the clinical context has not received attention in the academic literature. These efforts have resulted in a number of theoretical perspectives that still inform modern-day work on the persuasive power of fear and its implications for message design. Presenting a fear appeal more than doubles the probability of change relative to not presenting anything or presenting a low-fear appeal, said Albarracin. Fear appeals, also known as scare tactics, have been widely used to promote recommended preventive behaviors. Fear appeals are often used in public health service announcements and health behavior change campaigns. Next, these cognitive perceptions form a feedback loop with fear, as well as interact with each other to either predict protection motivation (which then predicts message acceptance) or defensive motivation (which then predicts message rejection). Although little research speaks to this issue, Williams-Piehota, Pizarro, Schneider, Mowad, and Salovey (2005) found that participants classified as blunters responded with less negative affect to mammography messages that were simple and direct versus lengthy and detailed in their presentation of threat and efficacy information. The authors found that though fear was the least common of the emotional responses found, tweets that did exhibit fear were significantly more likely than those that did not to contain a link to outside information and to contain requests for information, as well as interactive health information sharing between users. There is some difference in opinion as to whether fear appeals are productive or counterproductive. How Fear Appeal Approaches in COVID-19 Health Communication - PubMed Under this model, any behavior that effectively alleviates fear will then become automatically associated with relief from the aversive state, and that behavior will become a habitual response to threatening stimuli. With initial exposure to a fear appeal, recipients engage in a threat appraisal. Clipboard, Search History, and several other advanced features are temporarily unavailable. More specifically, the EPPM argues that if a message contains information on threat severity and susceptibility, fear will be aroused. More from Shoba Sreenivasan, Ph.D., and Linda E. Weinberger, Ph.D. Major life events can have significant consequences, yet the gnawing of persistent minor irritations may be more prevalent and harmful. Online ahead of print. Despite accumulating evidence that fear appeals could be persuasive, the field remained without a good explanation for the mechanisms of these message effects. explains the conditions under which fear appeals are likely to succeed. Social Facilitation in Fear Appeals Creates Positive Affect but Fear and Understanding in the Time of COVID-19. Which can you control and which can you not? Fear appeals have three major components: the message, the audience, and the recommended behavior. In place of focusing solely on the persuasive effects of fear, theorizing since the 1990s has shifted to understanding the role of other emotionswhether evoked by messages designed to produce fear or designed to simply be emotionalon persuasive outcomes. Appeal to fear in health care: appropriate or inappropriate? Maddux and Rogers (1983) argued that individuals who were high in both threat and efficacy perceptions would be motivated to protect themselves from the threat at hand and therefore the most likely to engage in adaptive, danger-control behaviors. In this article, we discuss the use of fear appeals during the COVID-19 pandemic and the potential negative sociobehavioral outcomes fear-based messaging may have. Loners come in many varieties, some of them perectly healthy. FOIA Although it is applied more in the context of news than persuasion, the EFM has the potential to assist in understanding how fear-based messages might generate persuasive influence by emphasizing how emotion-relevant information is more likely to be attended to later in the message and how post-message behaviors are likely to be consistent with emotional motivations. Thus, it may be that blunters may respond better to shorter, more direct fear appeals whereas monitors may be more willing to engage with longer or more detailed fear-inducing messages. Designing Health Messages: Approaches from Communication Theory and Using a within-subjects design and asking participants about their fear responses before, during, and after viewing a message about colorectal cancer screening using, Dillard et al. They looked at 127 research articles representing 248 independent samples and over 27,000 individuals from experiments conducted between 1962 and 2014. MeSH Arne hmans chapter on fear and anxiety in the third edition of the Handbook of Emotions provides a helpful overview of the biological and psychological underpinnings of the study of fear and its influence on cognition and behavior. Ethical Considerations on the Use of Fear in Public Health Campaigns The use of fear appeals to discourage adolescents from engaging in risky health behaviors, such as smoking and drug use, is well-documented and unsurprising, given that adolescents are often assumed to perceive themselves as less vulnerable to risk. On the other hand, proponents argue that fear appeals positively affect attitudes, intentions, and behaviors, with one meta-analysis reporting an average effect size of d = 0.29 (Tannenbaum et al., 2015 ). An official website of the United States government. To aid health professionals in redirecting away from the use of fear appeals, we offer a phased approach to creating health communication messages during the COVID-19 crisis. Fear-based appeals effective at changing attitudes, behaviors after all National Library of Medicine Substance cues are used in these types of prevention messages in order to gain and keep attention (Clayton et al., 2017a) and potentially inhibit message rejection when a fear appeal is present (Bailey et al., 2018; Sarge and Gong, 2019). eCollection 2023 Mar. Sixty years of fear appeal research: Current state of the evidence. There are many messages that convey important information about potential harm; however, if the message is to have any effect, it should address issues that instill critical amounts of fear and be targeted to those who are the most susceptible to the risk. In essence, the fear depicted in the message is so great that rather than deal with it, people stop listening, viewing, or reading it. For example, fear appeals begin with threat information followed by efficacy information. Further, the threat coverage was frequently sensationalistic, with more than half of stories referring to pandemic, outbreak, or death in ways disproportionate to the actual threat. (2015) calculated an average weighted effect size comparing groups exposed to moderate fear versus those exposed to high depicted fear. The protection motivation theory (Maddux & Rogers, 1983; Rogers, 1975) elaborated on the danger-control branch of the PPM, explicating four different cognitive reactions to fear appeals. Fear Appeals | Psychology Today One trait variable that has been studied for its contribution to fear arousal is trait anxiety, or the dispositional tendency toward experiencing anxiety and worry across situations. Further, individual differences have been considered to determine who is most likely to experience fear during and after message consumption. Fear appeals work for many public health messages, but not for COVID-1 Fear can be such a powerful tool that campaigns have been developed focusing on fear appeals. Fear appeals are messages that try to persuade people about the potential harm that may happen to them if they do not accept the messages recommendations (Tannenbaum et al., 2015). 2022 Oct 10;17(10):e0275854. He found that fear appeal manipulations resulted in a moderate relationship with perceived fear (r = .34), attitudes (r = .20), and behavior (r = .17). Once a moderate amount of fear is conveyed, there is no further benefit in adding more fear. The message is conveyed clearly that if students want to achieve their goals (e.g., getting a good job; gaining entry into college, or graduate/medical/law school), they cannot risk poor or sometimes even average grades. Further, current understanding of the role of individual differences as well as fears impact in contexts beyond direct persuasive messages, like news, entertainment, patient-provider dynamics, and social media, is likewise limited. Fear appeals have three major components: the message, the audience, and the recommended behavior. Given that fear-based messages, which may be perceived as a more manipulative message style, carry a higher likelihood of defensive processing and reactance, fear appeals may be a risky message strategy to use for this age group. For example, Nabi (1999) proposed the cognitive-functional model (CFM) to advance the literature on negative emotional appeals generally, including specific predictions regarding the role of fear in mediated persuasion. A review of the gender differences in fear and anxiety, A cognitive-functional model for the effects of discrete negative emotions on information processing, attitude change, and recall, Emotional flow in persuasive health messages, The role of a narratives emotional flow in promoting persuasive outcomes, Unrealistic hope and unnecessary fear: Exploring how sensationalistic news stories influence health behavior motivation, A protection motivation theory of fear appeals and attitude change, Appealing to fear: A meta-analysis of fear appeal effectiveness and theories, Matching health messages to monitor-blunter coping styles to motivate screening mammography, Putting the fear back into fear appeals: The extended parallel process model, A meta-analysis of fear appeals: Implications for effective public health campaigns, Examining the influence of trait anxiety/repressionsensitization on individuals reactions to fear appeals, A conceptualization of threat communications and protective health behavior, Risk-perception: Differences between adolescents and adults, The impact of vulnerability to and severity of a health risk on processing and acceptance of fear-arousing communications: A meta-analysis, Pathways to persuasion: Cognitive and experiential responses to health-promoting mass media messages, Effects of false positive and negative arousal feedback on persuasion, Threat, efficacy, and uncertainty in the first 5 months of national print and electronic news coverage of the H1N1 virus, The emotional effects of news frames on information processing and opinion formation, Fear and anxiety: Animal models and human cognitive psychophysiology, Threat appeals and persuasion: Seeking and finding the elusive curvilinear effect, Effects of threatening and reassuring components of fear appeals on physiological and verbal measures of emotion and attitudes, Narrative conjunctions of caregiver and child: A comparative perspective on socialization through stories, Monitoring and blunting: Validation of a questionnaire to assess styles of information seeking under threat, Laughing and crying: Mixed emotions, compassion, and the effectiveness of a YouTube PSA about skin cancer, Message properties, mediating states, and manipulation checks: Claims, evidence, and data analysis in experimental persuasive message effects research, The extended parallel process model: Illuminating the gaps in research, Emotion elicits the social sharing of emotion: Theory and empirical review, Fear control and danger control: A test of the extended parallel process model (EPPM), Message-Induced Self-Efficacy and its Role in Health Behavior Change, Worry and Rumination as a Consideration When Designing Health and Risk Messages, Lifespan and Developmental Considerations in Health and Risk Message Design, Using Pictures in Health and Risk Messages, Immersive Virtual Environments, Avatars, and Agents for Health, Spiral of Silence in Health and Risk Messaging, Physiological Measures of Wellness and Message Processing, Embarrassment and Health and Risk Messaging, Simultaneous and Successive Emotion Experiences and Health and Risk Messaging.
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