Fear Arousal and Health and Risk Messaging | Oxford Research Most notably, Leventhal (1970, 1971) argued that fear appeals evoked two separate but simultaneous processes: an emotional fear control reaction and a primarily cognitive danger-control reaction. Fear-based appeals effective at changing attitudes, behaviors after all 2022 Nov 1:1-27. doi: 10.1007/s11024-022-09479-4. HHS Vulnerability Disclosure, Help As this study suggests, more nuanced methodological approaches are needed to better understand how individuals experience fear appeals over the course of message exposure. Additionally, social media provide opportunities not only for social sharing but also for information requests from others, which in turn could improve health outcomes. Appealing to fear: A Meta-Analysis of fear appeal effectiveness and theories. If the threat appraisals are more dominant than the efficacy appraisals, individuals will seek to diminish their aroused fear through maladaptive behaviors, such as denigrating the message source or rationalizing their unhealthy behaviors. The American Psychological Association, in Washington, D.C., is the largest scientific and professional organization representing psychology in the United States. If fear appeal messages are defined or identified based primarily on their ability to elicit fear, message design elements and message response become conflated, which interferes with gaining insight into the message components responsible for generating the desired fear response (OKeefe, 2003). There has been sporadic attention in the literature to the individual differences that may determine the types of audiences who will be more or less persuaded by a fear appeal. Preparing for your first therapy session beforehand can help manage anxiety. official website and that any information you provide is encrypted This site needs JavaScript to work properly. Multiple book chapters also provide nice overviews of the existing research on the emotion of fear. As such, monitors and blunters may respond differently to fear appeal messages. Witte and Allen (2000), in their meta-analysis, did not find a significant relationship between trait anxiety and post-message attitudes, intentions, or behaviors. Fear appeal is a term used in psychology, sociology and marketing. When people are aware of a threat, the aversive state of fear quickly follows. MeSH Schweinhart A, Arambur C, Bauer R, Simons-Rudolph A, Atwood K, Luseno WK. Designing Health Messages: Approaches from Communication Theory and There are many messages that convey important information about potential harm; however, if the . From a message-design standpoint, the EPPM suggests that fear-arousing messages should include both threat and efficacy information if they are to persuade audiences to take adaptive actions. government site. Please enable it to take advantage of the complete set of features! Researchers now believe anxiety disorders and PTSD are whole brain conditions. Evidence from a meta-analysis of fear appeals found that appeals targeting female-dominated audiences are more effective than those targeting male audiences, likely because women tend to be more prevention focused in that they are more sensitive to avoiding negative outcomes than to seeking positive outcomes (Tannenbaum et al., 2015). found that this dynamic approach offered evidence in support of a curvilinear relationship between fear and persuasion. These topics have generated great interest from scholars in multiple fields, ranging from communication and media studies to psychology, sociology, behavioral economics, and beyond. Indeed, in a systematic review of the EPPM literature, Popova (2012) found that two of Wittes (1992) propositions, (a) when perceived efficacy is at a moderate level, perceived threat will have an inverted-U-shaped effect on message acceptance, and (b) when perceived efficacy is at a high level, there is a reciprocal relationship between perceived threat and fear, have yet to be empirically tested. A campaign with gruesome photos of a person dying of lung cancer to combat smoking might make people think twice . 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. Health persuasion through emoji: How emoji interacted with information source to predict health behaviors in COVID-19 situation. These appeals are effective at changing attitudes, intentions and behaviors. He found that fear appeal manipulations resulted in a moderate relationship with perceived fear (r = .34), attitudes (r = .20), and behavior (r = .17). Conclusion: Fear Appeals and Message Effects. It holds that a fear appeal argument initiates a cognitive assessment process that considers the severity of the threatened event, the probability of the occurrence of the event, and the efficacy of a recommended behavior response. Some individuals, known as monitors, tend to experience more anxiety and prefer more, rather than less, information about health threats; whereas blunters instead avoid information related to threats. Throughout the history of the study of fear appeals, any message that evoked negative emotion would often be categorized as a fear appeal. 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. That is because threat perceptions are necessary to elicit fear but efficacy perceptions are necessary to promote protection motivation. However, trait anxiety has been linked to other outcomes of fear appeals. The CFM predicts that because fears action tendency motivates individuals to avoid threatening situations, message-related fear should predispose audiences to want to avoid giving further attention to the message. Their results indicated that most stories (86%) referenced threat and of these, 94% did so in the first third of the story. There are very few circumstances under which they are not effective and there are no identifiable circumstances under which they backfire and lead to undesirable outcomes, said Dolores Albarracin, PhD, professor of psychology at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an author of the study, published in the journal Psychological Bulletin. Mongeaus (1998) meta-analysis examined the influence of fear appeals on perceived fear, attitudes, and behaviors. Indeed, the more intense the emotional experience or the greater the emotional disruption, the more likely it is to be socially shared and shared repetitively over an extended period of time (Rim, 2009). APA's membership includes more than 122,500 researchers, educators, clinicians, consultants and students. 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. Keywords: Changes in Mental Health, Emotional Distress, and Substance Use Affecting Women Experiencing Violence and Their Service Providers during COVID-19 in a U.S. Southern State. More research examining the influence of fear-based health news storieswith particular focus on the structure of such news stories and audience expectations, or schema, about the type of content in different types of messagesis necessary. The other two perceptions related to the target behavior: the effectiveness of the target behavior for avoiding the threat (response efficacy) and the ability of the individual to enact the target behavior (self-efficacy). Though the four cognitions identified in the PMT proved important to persuasive outcomes in response to fear appeals, the specific relationships among them as asserted by the theory were not fully supported by empirical evidence. 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. Despite accumulating evidence that fear appeals could be persuasive, the field remained without a good explanation for the mechanisms of these message effects. It generally describes a strategy for motivating people to take a particular action. Fear Appeals | Psychology Today Shoba Sreenivasan, Ph.D., and Linda E. Weinberger, Ph.D. Find a therapist to combat fear and anxiety, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.trf.2007.11.001, Small Hassles, Big Stress: Why the Little Things Get to Us, How to Tell if Your Relationships Are Genuine, 18 Common Logical Fallacies and Persuasion Techniques, The 3 Parts of Anxiety: Thoughts, Emotions, and Behaviors, Using Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs to Discover What Motivates You, The 5 Types of People Who Withdraw From Social Life, Benzodiazepine Withdrawal Tied to Serious Long-Term Harms, How to Boost Your Courage Without Battling Your Fears, Why Sound Is So Important in Horror Movies, How to Prepare for Your First Therapy Session. Participants read news stories designed to evoke either fear or hope about the human papilloma virus (HPV) and with different levels of response efficacy information regarding the impending HPV vaccine. "One is seats, one is . For example, the core relational theme of fear is imminent threat. DOI: 10.1002/ijop.12042, Tannenbaum, M. B., Hepler, J., Zimmerman, R. S., Saul, L., Jacobs, S., Wilson, K., & Albarracin, D. (2015). Example: thetruth.com. As such, each theory or model does not always present a direct response to its immediate predecessor. That is, adolescents may not perceive themselves to be less vulnerable to risk as much as they actually perceive a range of health-threatening behaviors as less risky than they actually are, compared to their adult counterparts. 8600 Rockville Pike A second more general approach to considering the influence of discrete emotions, including fear, on persuasive outcome is the emotions-as-frames perspective, which argues that an audience members emotional state provides a lens through which individuals pay attention to and process message information (Nabi, 2003). This research suggests that exposure to health news storiesfear-generating ones in particularcan influence audience health behaviors, but that the traditional fear appeal structure does not always translate to the news context. For example, after viewing fear appeal messages on drinking and driving, some people who drink and drive may respond by claiming that their drinking does not affect their driving skills, and thus the message does not apply to them. Although fear may predispose audiences to engage in defensive motivations, it also prompts consideration of efficacy potential. Given that theories of motivation were losing favor to those that focused on cognition in the field of psychology in the 1970s, it is unsurprising that the next major advance in fear appeal theorizing focused on the cognitive elements associated with fear appeal effectiveness. However, the resources listed below are helpful places to start exploring these topics as they are addressed in the academic literature. Careers. 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. That is, the message might not only be rejected by the audience, but the behavior that the message intended to change could become further entrenched. An official website of the United States government. Fear appeals that recommend one-time behaviors are more effective than appeals that recommend repeated behaviors. Some recent studies have examined the structure of health news in ways that speak to the link between emotional arousal, most notably fear, and persuasive outcomes. 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. People cope with potentially threatening information in different ways. 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. The study of fear-based messages has a long and robust history. Although the predicted interaction between threat and efficacy appraisals lies at the heart of the EPPM, the full model includes 12 propositions detailing numerous intricate relationships between the different types of cognitions, fear, and message effectiveness (Witte, 1992). Understanding the personalities of the audience (e.g., the typical characteristics and traits of women in comparison to men, or of adolescents versus young or middle-aged people, or of those who are health conscious versus those who are not) will help in designing a campaign that is better directed toward the targeted individuals. Generally, the findings reveal that fear appeals do work; however, more specific results were also discovered (Tannenbaum et al, 2015). Presenting a fear appeal more than doubles the probability of change relative to not presenting anything or presenting a low-fear appeal, said Albarracin. How 'fear appeals' and disinformation may be manipulating the public on For example, fear appeals begin with threat information followed by efficacy information. Register for the early bird rate. The emotional flow perspective suggests that the threat information results in fear arousal, and the efficacy information is associated with feelings of hope. "These appeals are effective at changing attitudes, intentions and behaviors. His 1971 theoretical article published in the American Journal of Public Health includes a discussion of previous works dating back to Darwin alongside a discussion of promising ways to persuade people to adopt preventative health behaviors. It's Time to Scare People About Covid - The New York Times American Psychological Association. PostedSeptember 18, 2018 Book chapters that discuss fears role in communication and media processes and effects also provide helpful overviews of the state of the literature as well as suggestions for future research directions. Discover the world's . After decades of research, it is clear that fear can indeed motivate positive health behaviors and that exposure to information about threat susceptibility, severity, response efficacy, and self-efficacy is key to this process. Yet, little attention has been paid to this issue. Additionally, Tannenbaum et al. Maslows so-called "hierarchy of needs"is often presented as a five-level pyramid where the bottom four levels are "deficiency needs.". 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. Finally, given the expectation that emotional experience directs information processing and information accessibility, the EFM predicts that decision-making and action will be heavily influenced by these emotion-driven processes. The third component recommended behavior is important because it gives instruction on what to do to avert or reduce the risk of harm. Although the lions share of research on the persuasive influence of fear focuses on persuasive advertisements, other media messages may be considered as possible conduits of influence via fear arousal. Thus, in this context, the emphasis is on how existing fear or anxiety may be minimized by the providers communication style rather than the providers communication being the stimulus for fear. As such, adaptive outcomes are likely. Horror movies use sound to frighten audiences. APA 2023 registration is now open! 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. eCollection 2023 Mar. 2023 Jan 21;21:101343. doi: 10.1016/j.ssmph.2023.101343. Given personality traits influence perceptions of events, and given emotions are based on such perceptions, personality traits could influence whether or not a fear appeal is likely to evoke fear, to what degree, and toward what end. Additionally, they found that the fear aroused by messages that included a message-based fear or threat manipulation was associated with attitudes (r = .15), intentions (r = .13), and behavior change (r = .16). However, this assumes news stories are processed as fear appeals, which is as yet an open question. 8.2.2 Types of appeals in health communication - Open University Six children were among the dead after a Russian missile attack on Uman; Russian soldiers are likely being placed in improvised cells consisting of holes in the ground as punishment, the UK's MoD . Fear appeals have three major components: the message, the audience, and the recommended behavior. Currently, scholars are considering how emotions in addition to fear influence the effect of fear appeals (e.g., emotional flow) and possible moderators of fear appeal effects. However, fear appeals should be used cautiously, since they may backfire if target audiences do not believe they are able to effectively avert a threat [ 21] p. 605. To help settle the debate, Albarracin and her colleagues conducted what they believe to be the most comprehensive meta-analysis to date. The PubMed wordmark and PubMed logo are registered trademarks of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS). Fear messages that let the audience know they can perform the recommended behavior or that the behavior will have a positive result are more effective than fear appeal messages without mention of recommended actions. Indeed, the Tannenbaum et al. Conversely, the frequent use of fear appeals across a range of issues could possibly result in a chronic sense of heightened anxiety. We encourage public health professionals to reevaluate their desire to use fear appeals in COVID-19 health communication and recommend that evidence-based health communication be utilized to address the needs of a specific community, help people understand what they are being asked to do, explain step-by-step how to complete preventative behaviors, and consider external factors needed to support the uptake of behaviors. They also confirmed prior findings that fear appeals are effective when they describe how to avoid the threat (e.g., get the vaccine, use a condom). Although this approach suggests that patient anxieties may be reduced through the presentation of efficacy-related information, which is consistent with fear-appeal messaging, there are large gaps in this area of research that would benefit from additional attention.
Park Ranger Aaron And Lb Father And Son, Illegal Eviction Penalties California, Unspeakable Warehouse Location, Articles H