tailieunhanh - A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals: Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns

The primary role of education in schools is learning and the social development of young people. Schools focus mainly on building a body of knowledge and competencies in all areas of the curriculum. Their task is not to solve the problems of society, including public health issues, but ideally to take a positive approach to nurturing, encouraging and challenging children and adolescents in ways that are appropriate to their age and levels of psychological development across a range of curriculum areas. . | A Meta-Analysis of Fear Appeals Implications for Effective Public Health Campaigns Kim Witte PhD Mike Allen PhD The fear appeal literature is examined in a comprehensive synthesis using meta-analytical techniques. The meta-analysis suggests that strong fear appeals produce high levels of perceived severity and susceptibility and are more persuasive than low or weak fear appeals. The results also indicate that fear appeals motivate adaptive danger control actions such as message acceptance and maladaptive fear control actions such as defensive avoidance or reactance. It appears that strong fear appeals and high-efficacy messages produce the greatest behavior change whereas strong fear appeals with low-efficacy messages produce the greatest levels of defensive responses. Future directions and practical implications are provided. Although considerable laboratory research has shown that fear appeals persuasive messages that arouse fear motivate behavior change across a variety of behaviors public health researchers and practitioners continue to contend that fear appeals Given these conflicting viewpoints 4-6 the purpose of this article is to provide a comprehensive review and update of the fear appeal research. The focus in this work will be on the empirical analysis and synthesis of more than 100 fear appeal articles. This analysis updates Sutton s7 and Boster and Mongeau s8 and Mongeau s9 limited update fear appeal meta-analyses and examines several variables previously unexamined in meta-analyses such as threat and efficacy interactions and fear control outcomes . An update of previous work is needed because there has been a tremendous increase in the number of fear appeal articles in the past dozen years. FEAR APPEAL THEORY 1953 TO THE PRESENT Across the nearly 50 years of research on fear appeals three key independent variables have been identified fear perceived threat and perceived efficacy. Fear is defined as a negatively valenced emotion .