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In response to concerns regarding frequent uses of emotional appeals and endorsers in DTCA, this paper aims to investigate the relative effects of fear‐eliciting and non‐fear‐eliciting DTC ads on elaboration and attitude change regarding the drug and health issue, and evaluation of endorser credibility.

A between‐subject experiment was conducted with 96 students in a large state university. Fear appeals and endorser credibility were manipulated via stimulus ads. Participants' responses on elaboration, attitudes, and behavior intentions after ad exposure were compared between fear and non‐fear conditions. In addition, the directions of influence among these variables and endorser credibility were examined via path analyses.

Fear elicitation had little effect on the type of elaboration generated since the elaboration was dominated by message‐related (vs endorser‐related) thoughts. However, the fear‐eliciting ad affected brand‐related and health‐related outcomes differentially. It had positive influence on attitudes toward the health issue, but negative influence on ad attitudes. Furthermore, ad attitudes had little impact on brand attitudes or brand‐related behavior intentions when fear was elicited in the ad.

Considering a paucity of research on the effects of emotional appeals and endorsers in DTCA, the authors' findings provide important insights for researchers and practitioners about how a specific emotion elicited in the ad has differential impact on brand‐related and health‐related outcomes and how the effectiveness of emotional appeals and endorser credibility can be maximized.

This paper aims to investigate the level of fear experienced by students aged 13 to 30 years, in response to different types of anti‐smoking fear appeals. It seeks to extend and validate Quinn et al.'s study by specifically comparing adolescent and young adult responses to fear appeals.

A total of 548 useable questionnaires were collected via a self‐administered questionnaire based on established scales. Factor analysis, T tests and ANOVA were used to replicate Quinn et al.'s analysis of the data.

The main results are consistent with previous findings that adolescents and non‐smokers experience more fear. Further, general health and factual appeals cause the most fear across all ages but adolescents were more fearful of factual appeals and social ostracism appeals than young adults possibly indicating that factual and social appeals are better targeted at adolescents than young adults. The results were broadly similar to Quinn et al.'s results.

Advertisers often use realistic fear appeals to attract the attention of the intended recipient, to scare the recipient into processing the information, and to get them to act in response to the anti‐smoking message. However, because adolescents and nonsmokers experience more fear, social marketers, governments, schools and parents need to customise fear appeals to suit these recipients.

The current study re‐tests and revalidates the effect of these different appeal types amongst adolescents and young adults. The results will help clarify which type of fear appeal causes more fear amongst adolescents and young adults in Australia, 20 years on from Quinn et al.'s study.

Prior researches on the adoption of mobile health services (MHS) concentrate on the subjective cognitive appraisals resulting in technology adoption, while ignoring how to shape those cognitive appraisals by the objective message design strategies which are easier to operate in practice. Based on protection motivation theory (PMT), the current research aims to explore the antecedents of cognitive appraisals by focusing on message design strategies of fear appeal and coping appeal.

A two-stage scenario-based survey of 204 participants was conducted to collect data. The authors chose SPSS and covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) approach with the software LISREL 8.8 to test our model.

The results show that the relationship between fear appeal and fear arousal is inverted U-shaped such that the degree of fear arousal is the greatest when the fear appeal is at a moderate level. Perceived usefulness for the message with negative framing is higher than that with positive framing. Furthermore, fear appeal and coping appeal have a significant interaction on the adoption of MHS at different stages.

The sample data of this study come from a special health service of a special group in China, which limits the universality of our research results for other groups or health care services. Therefore, future researchers can validate the model in other research scenarios and sample populations.

This study shows how fear appeal and coping appeal work together to influence individuals' adoption intention. The authors’ findings expand the theoretical depth of PMT and fear theory, enriching the theoretical connotation of framing effect in mobile health technology adoption context, which add new insights to design more persuasive messages through fear appeal and coping appeal for researchers and MHS providers in mobile health communication or propaganda.

This paper aims to assess the interactive impact of dispositional threat orientation and affirmation (both self-affirmation and self-efficacy) on the effectiveness of fear appeals.

A 3 × 2 × 2 × 2 fully crossed, mixed experimental design is used. The study is conducted through an on-line survey platform. Participants are nationally representative in terms of age, gender and geographic location within the USA.

Threat orientation impacts individuals’ responses to fear appeals. Control-oriented individuals respond in a more adaptive manner, heightened-sensitivity-oriented individuals are a “mixed-bag” and denial-oriented individuals respond in a more maladaptive manner. Affirmations (both self-affirmation and self-efficacy) interact with threat orientation in some cases to predict response to threat.

This research used a cross-sectional approach in an on-line environment. A longitudinal study with a stronger self-affirmation intervention and self-efficacy manipulation would offer a stronger test.

Social marketers should consider whether their primary target market has a general tendency toward a particular threat orientation when considering the use of fear appeals. Social marketers should consider the potential benefits of a self-affirmation intervention.

Individuals’ personality dispositions impact how they respond to fear appeals, which may explain why some seemingly well executed fear appeals are unsuccessful whereas others succeed.

Little or no research has examined the use of self-affirmation to overcome the challenges posed by dispositional threat orientation. This research gives an early glimpse into how these issues interplay.

A fear appeal is a communication tactic designed to scare people into adopting desired behaviors (e.g. wash hands to avoid contracting COVID-19). While it is generally acknowledged that fear appeals can be persuasive at motivating behavior, this paper aims to identify how to optimally identify how to optimally frame the focal threat to increase their effectiveness as well as to uncover additional underlying processes.

The authors conducted four experimental studies.

This research validates that exposure to fear appeals can strongly motivate behavior. However, this study shows that this effect is moderated by threat specificity. Specifically, this study demonstrates that people are more motivated to engage in behaviors that facilitate threat avoidance after exposure to a personally relevant threat that represents a nonspecific (e.g. aging appearance) rather than a specific outcome (e.g. wrinkles). This effect is mediated by perceptions of assimilation (versus contrast) to the focal threat. This study reliably shows the effect across three threat domains (i.e. aging appearance, weight gain, illness) and for different behaviors.

Theoretically speaking, this study contributes to the fear appeal literature by identifying a new type of message framing that has the potential to increase fear appeal’s persuasive power, and uncovering a distinct mechanism by which fear appeals impact behavior. Practically speaking, the findings confirm that fear appeals have the potential to help marketers mobilize consumer behavior, especially when the communication highlights a nonspecific rather than specific threat.

Fear appeals in advertising communication are considered by advertisers when other types of advertising appeals do not achieve expected effects. Fear appeals, by arousing the fear that something may threaten consumers’ present lives, are often adopted to persuade individuals to take a particular action. Although this topic has been widely studied, the internal operation mechanism of fear appeals in consumers has not been fully understood or agreed upon.

Three experiments were conducted where the type of fear appeal was manipulated (i.e. physical fear appeal or social ear appeal), as well as consumers’ consideration of future consequences (CFC) and mental imagery approaches.

This study examined the effects of fear appeal on mental imagery fluency and how it affects advertising effectiveness and the moderating effect of consumers’ CFC were discussed. When receiving advertisements with physical fear appeals, consumers with low CFC had greater mental imagery fluency than did those with high CFC. Furthermore, consumers’ purchase intentions could be improved by increasing consumers’ mental imagery fluency on fear appeal. Therefore, the interaction between fear appeal and CFC on purchase intention was mediated by mental imagery fluency. This study found that consumers responded differently to fear appeal advertising when they engaged in different mental imagery approaches.

The present study adds to social marketing literature by showing how consumers’ mental imagery fluency influence the fear appeal effectiveness, and this study’s results also enable social marketers to understand the two factors (i.e. consumers’ CFC level and mental imagery approaches) that affect the influence of fear appeals on consumers’ purchase intentions. Moreover, social marketers are recommended to provide consumers with advertising information by using various message types to facilitate consumers’ imagination of advertising appeals. This heightens the importance of consumers’ acceptance and absorption of advertising content, in turn, strengthening their purchase intentions.

Review of various models of the fear communication process and research on the effectiveness of fear appeals indicates that fear arousal is a complex, individually unique emotion. Inconsistent results concerning the impact of fear appeals in consumer behavior are noted. Issues arising from employing fear appeals in advertising are outlined and practical guidelines for their use are presented.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the effect of level of graphic threat (weak and strong) and the amount of information (low and high) on message effectiveness for an unfamiliar (a muscle disorder due to lack of physical exercise) vs a familiar (injuries as a result of traffic accidents due to drunk driving) issue.

The method employed was experimental 2 (issue familiarity: unfamiliar, familiar issue)×2 (amount of information: low, high)×2 (graphic threat level: weak, strong) full factorial between‐subjects design. Data are collected from a sample of 206 Belgians.

It was found that a strong graphic threat message has a greater effect for an unfamiliar than for a familiar issue. For a familiar issue, adding information to a weak threat appeal increases perceived severity. For an unfamiliar issue, adding information to a strong graphic threat appeal has a similar effect. Perceived severity of threat, perceived probability of occurrence, evoked fear and perceived coping efficacy have a significant effect on the intention to adopt the recommended behavior. For an unfamiliar issue, perceived efficacy and perceived probability of occurrence primarily have the greatest impact on coping intention. For a familiar issue, perceived severity, evoked fear and perceived efficacy determine coping intention.

The results substantially support the use of different message tactics for health threats that are either new or familiar for the target group.

Most studies have limited themselves to studying the impact of threat strength on perceived threat and response efficacy, on evoked fear and on message acceptance. The present study adds the contextual and message elements, namely issue familiarity and amount of information provided, the link of which with threat appeal has – as far to the authors' knowledge never been studied before in one integrated analysis.

The purpose of this paper is to test the protection motivation theory (PMT) in the context of fear appeal interventions to reduce the threat of phishing attacks. In addition, it was tested to what extent the model relations are equivalent across fear appeal conditions and across time.

A pre-test post-test design was used. In the pre-test, 1,201 internet users filled out an online survey and were presented with one of three fear appeal conditions: strong fear appeal, weak fear appeal and control condition. Arguments regarding vulnerability of phishing attacks and response efficacy of vigilant online information-sharing behaviour were manipulated in the fear appeals. In the post-test, data were collected from 786 internet users and analysed with partial least squares path modelling.

The study found that PMT model relations hold in the domain of phishing. Self-efficacy and fear were the most important predictors of protection motivation. In general, the model results were equivalent across conditions and across time.

It is important to consider online information-sharing behaviour because it facilitates the occurrence and success of phishing attacks. The results give practitioners more insight into important factors to address in the design of preventative measures to reduce the success of phishing attacks. Future research is needed to test how fear appeals work in real-world settings and over longer periods.

This paper is a substantial adaptation of a previous conference paper (Jansen and Van Schaik, 2017a, b).

Firms continue to struggle with end users who do not follow recommended actions for safeguarding information security. Thus, the authors utilize insights gained from studies on heuristic processing of risk information to design cues in fear appeal messages more effectively so as to more strongly engender fear among users, which can in turn lead them to take protective actions toward information security. Specifically, four types of fear appeal cues are identified: numeric risk communication, social distance and goal framing in verbal risk communication and visual risk communication.

Drawing from protection motivation theory, the authors hypothesize that these fear appeal cues can engender fear among users to a greater extent. In addition, the authors hypothesize that users will perceive a higher level of severity and susceptibility when they perceive a large amount of fear. The research hypotheses were tested employing data collected through a laboratory experiment. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) and regression analyses were performed to analyze the data.

The study's results suggest that numeric and visual risk communication cues in security notices can significantly increase the amount of fear felt by users. In addition, social distance was found to marginally increase the amount of fear felt by users. However, unlike our expectation, goal framing was not found to increase the amount of fear when the other three types of fear appeal cues were also given in a security notice. It was also found that induced fear can increase the severity and susceptibility of threats as perceived by users.

The study contributes to the literature on fear appeal cues designed to promote users' security protection behaviors. No prior study has designed security notices featuring the four different types of fear appeal cues and empirically tested the effectiveness of those cues in inducing fear among users. The findings suggest that the design of fear appeal cues can be improved by understanding individuals' heuristic processing of risk information, which can be subject to cognitive biases.