fear appeal

Health campaigns often use "fear appeals" to grab the attention of their audience.

Fear appeals are often used in marketing and social policy, as a method of persuasion.

"Fear appeals and attacks work best before voters have crystallized their decision."

Fear appeals to emotion and is not easily susceptible to rational discussion.

A meta-analysis of fear appeals: Implications for effective public health campaigns.

Yet such fear appeals continue despite mixed reviews from experts who doubt that they can change behavior in the long term.

The subjective expected utility theory has been applied to contexts beyond fear appeals.

Also of interest in the fear appeals literature has been the contribution of individual characteristics.

Some have even argued that cognitive processes in the context of fear appeals are more important than emotional ones.

Mixed results have been produced from studies that attempt to demonstrate the effectiveness of fear appeals for behavior modification.

For example, a dental hygiene presentation to a group of high school students reported greater change in attitudes using mild rather than strong fear appeals.

Researchers have examined several variables that have been thought, at one time or another, to influence the persuasive effect of fear appeals.

Rethinking the study of fear appeals.

A transtheoretical model of fear appeals explains a dynamic process of health behavior change.

The study, which took two years, cited several past studies of drug abuse and media campaigns that found that strong "fear appeals" rarely succeeded.

There is also a good organizational reason why agencies fear appeals: appeals introduce uncertainty (cf.

Defensive avoidance is an example of a fear control response that leads to the failure of fear appeals.

Examples of well-known, and frequently applied, behavior change methods are fear appeals, persuasive communication, and modeling.

Protection Motivation Theory is a theory that was originally created to help clarify fear appeals.

A multitude of theories and models of fear appeals, also known as cognitive mediating processes, have been derived from this research.

It also concludes that fear appeals fail when the fear emotion is reduced via the fear control process.

The theory of reasoned action differs from other theories because it also incorporates a social influence factor in predicting the efficacy of fear appeals.

"The ultimate goal of fear appeals is to effectively promote reflective message processing and to influence individual affect towards the message".

In a study by Averbeck, Jones, and Robertson (2011), researchers look at how prior knowledge influences one's response to fear appeals.

The results of the research have demonstrated that various, and sometimes multiple factors, affect the efficacy of fear appeals depending on the method used and the individual.