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Travel decreased dramatically during the initial wave of the COVID-19 pandemic, only to return rapidly to prepandemic levels once the degree of fear toward the virus began to diminish among potential travelers. This USA-based 16-month repeated-measure cross-sectional survey study aims to explore the degree to which fear of COVID affected people’s decisions to stay home rather than to travel during the pandemic.

The research used survey data. An extensive data set, composed of over 9,500 respondents, collected through Mechanical Turk over a 16-month time period, was used to compare respondent fear of the pandemic both with their attitudes toward future travel and with Smith Travel Research data reflecting actual pandemic travel patterns.

The results demonstrate how fear of COVID was closely and negatively linked to both travel intentions and travel behavior.

Data were collected from US respondents only.

The findings significantly extend earlier studies and provide guidance for those studying travel consumer behavior regarding trends that should be monitored in the case of a future pandemic or other fear-inducing crisis. For hospitality and tourism managers and marketers, understanding fear as a leading indicator of future travel behavior can result in more timely promotional efforts and staffing and training decisions.

Measuring and understanding consumer fear levels as this relates to travel decisions can help in the future to adjust the message that is sent to the public, perhaps reducing the amount of travel taken during periods when this is unwise and or unsafe.

This paper extends previous work that had been based upon cross-sectional reviews, providing a broader and more valuable study of an important and timely consumer behavior travel topic.

Background: Fear has been a common response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic throughout the world. In Mauritius, the outbreak of COVID-19 has been an exceptional occurrence requiring stringent confinement of the population. In this study, we have explored people’s reactions to COVID-19 during confinement, with emphasis on fear and the impact of news on the level of fear.

Methods: An anonymized online survey was carried out during confinement. Participation was voluntary. Participants reported fear level on a scale from 1-10, where no fear scored 1 and maximum fear scored 10. Participants reported the impact of news on their fear level on a scale of 1-10, where 1 represented no impact and 10 represented maximum impact. Participants reported the status of information received about COVID-19 on a scale of 1-10 where 1 represented no information on COVID-19 and 10 represented maximum information on COVID-19.

Results: The self-rated level of fear during confinement had a mean of 5.09 with 95%CI [4.70, 5.47]. This increased to a mean of 6.39 with 95%CI [6.00-6.78] at the prospect of confinement being lifted. The difference was statistically significant (paired-sample T-test, p<0.001). With regard to the impact of news on fear of COVID-19, the mean for local news was 5.97 with 95%CI [5.59, 6.34] whereas that of worldwide news was 6.86 with 95%CI [6.50, 7.23]. Worldwide news had a more significant impact (paired-sample T-test, p<0.001). The information score about COVID-19 had a mean of 5.12 with 95%CI [4.71, 5.53].

Conclusions: Participants experienced a moderate level of fear of COVID-19 during confinement which increased at the prospect of confinement being lifted, implying that people felt safer during confinement. Their fear was influenced more by international news than by local news. Overall participants reported that they were moderately well informed about the COVID-19 pandemic.

The current study investigated fear of crime and perceived risk of victimisation in a general population sample of gay and heterosexual men in the United Kingdom. 55 gay and 57 heterosexual men were recruited via opportunity sampling, in Manchester, north‐west England. They were required to complete a questionnaire asking about their fear of becoming a victim of several different types of crime, their perceived risk of victimisation, types of avoidance behaviours in which they partake, and experiences of crime.Results indicated that gay men had higher levels of fear and perceived risk of victimisation than heterosexual men, for most crimes tested. Avoidance of crime, and personal experience of victimisation significantly related to both fear of crime and perceived risk of victimisation. Risk of victimisation, being gay, previously having been victimised and experience of incivilities were highlighted as key factors predicting levels of fear.In conclusion, methodological issues and future research are considered.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of fear of crime on consumer shopping intentions at a secondary business district in the USA.

Qualitative methodologies are used to first develop factors associated with fear of crime. These factors are then tested quantitatively with a sample of residents from a community bordering an established secondary shopping district. The model, which also includes behavior and subjective social norms as explanatory variables, is tested using multiple ordinary least square regression.

Only a single factor associated with fear of crime (which includes measures of vagrancies, lighting, and cleanliness) is found to be significantly related to shopping intentions. The findings do not differ between males and females. The remaining five factors associated with fear of crime are not significantly related to shopping intentions.

The paper is limited to a single location and measures shopping intentions but not actual shopping activity. Future research can build in these two areas.

Retailers located in older shopping districts are challenged to renew interest among shoppers. This paper suggests that by focusing on a few key environmental characteristics, retailers can reduce the fear of crime and improve consumers' shopping intentions.

Given the many older, secondary shopping districts, this paper is one of a few to link specific shopping district characteristics to fear of crime and shopping intentions.

Guided by Ericson’s counter-law analytic, the focus of this paper is how peace bonds erode traditional criminal law principles to govern uncertainty and provide applicants with a “freedom from fear” (Ericson, 2007a). Peace bonds permit the courts to impose a recognizance on anyone likely to cause harm or “personal injury” to a complainant. This paper conducts a critical discourse analysis to answer the question: how and to what extent are peace bonds a form of counter-law? Facilitated by the erosion of traditional criminal law principles and rationalized under a precautionary logic, proving that a complainant is fearful through a peace bond can result in the expansion of the state’s capacity to criminalize and conduct surveillance.

This chapter explores military women’s fear of sexual assault, especially while deployed overseas, the strategies they use to manage those fears, and the health consequences of both their fears and their strategies for reducing them.

Data come from 25 in-depth, semi-structured qualitative interviews conducted in 2012 and 2013 with women veterans and military members. All participants were under age 45 and had deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan at some point.

Surprisingly, 44% reported neither concern about sexual assault nor any special strategies taken to prevent it. In contrast, another 44% reported both concern about sexual assault and special strategies taken to prevent it. Finally, 12% reported no special concerns about sexual assault due to the strategies they took to prevent it. For these latter two groups, rape-preventions strategies and the fears that led to them could contribute to lack of exercise, sleep difficulties, anxiety, depression, or post-traumatic stress disorder.

This research is based on a small and non-random sample which over-represents southwestern residents, whites, Army members, and commissioned officers, and under-represents African Americans, Navy members, noncommissioned officers, and enlisted personnel. As a result, it cannot be used to extrapolate to the population more generally. It also focuses solely on women’s experiences, due to their greater risk of assault, although men’s experiences with sexual trauma certainly deserve further study. Finally, the research relied on only one coder, which may have reduced reliability. However, it is less likely to have reduced validity compared to studies utilizing multiple coders, since such studies typically use coders who either share or have been trained to use the main authors’ intellectual perspectives.

Previous research has looked at the effect of sexual assault on female military members. This chapter extends that research by exploring how fear of rape can affect female military members even if they are not themselves assaulted, with a special focus on its health effects. In addition, previous research on fear of rape in the general population has focused on its social effects. This chapter suggests the need for further research on potential health effects of fear of rape in the general population.

This chapter explores how Cypriot lecturers perceive and experience fear while being at work. Drawing on the lens of interpretive inquiry, data were collected through interviews with 19 lecturers. Analysis focused on experiences of workplace fear offering rich insights into characteristics of fear, eliciting events, and coping ways. Findings help to unveil the specific events that lead to fear in the Cypriot universities, and the ways lecturers manage their fearful experiences. The study contributes to the study of discrete emotions, by empirically examining fear’s own storyline through the workers’ own perspectives, within a specific context.

Fear appeals are persuasive messages that attempt to arouse fear to motivate or influence behaviour change and are widely used in health promotion. This chapter analyses how fear appeal messaging was used by the Namibian and South African mainstream print media to communicate COVID-19 during the two countries’ main waves of the pandemic. Specifically, we examine the framing strategies that the media used to persuade behaviour change. Mainstream media has enormous potential to influence health-related behaviour and perceptions. Therefore, it is compelling to examine the mainstream media’s framing of COVID-19. This study draws on framing theory to examine media frames and the use of fear appeal in the coverage of COVID-19 in the top English-language newspapers in the two countries. We argue in this chapter that using fear appeals in public health communication by the media may be counterproductive as a tool of persuasion.

Organizational behavior scholars have long recognized the importance of a variety of emotion-related phenomena in everyday work life. Indeed, after three decades, the span of research on emotions in the workplace encompasses a wide variety of affective variables such as emotional climate, emotional labor, emotion regulation, positive and negative affect, empathy, and more recently, specific emotions. Emotions operate in complex ways across multiple levels of analysis (i.e., within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group, and organizational) to exert influence on work behavior and outcomes, but their linkages to human resource management (HRM) policies and practices have not always been explicit or well understood. This chapter offers a review and integration of the bourgeoning research on discrete positive and negative emotions, offering insights about why these emotions are relevant to HRM policies and practices. We review some of the dominant theories that have emerged out of functionalist perspectives on emotions, connecting these to a strategic HRM framework. We then define and describe four discrete positive and negative emotions (fear, pride, guilt, and interest) highlighting how they relate to five HRM practices: (1) selection, (2) training/learning, (3) performance management, (4) incentives/rewards, and (5) employee voice. Following this, we discuss the emotion perception and regulation implications of these and other discrete emotions for leaders and HRM managers. We conclude with some challenges associated with understanding discrete emotions in organizations as well as some opportunities and future directions for improving our appreciation and understanding of the role of discrete emotional experiences in HRM.

This chapter explores theory and local context of socially constructed pandemic fears during COVID-19; how material and non-material fear objects are construed, interpreted and understood by communities, and how fears disrupt social norms and influence pandemic behavioural responses. We aimed to understand the lived experiences of pandemic-induced fears in socioculturally diverse communities in eastern Indonesia in the context of onto-epistemological disjunctures between biomedically derived public health interventions, local world views and causal-remedial explanations for the crisis. Ethnographic research conducted among several communities in East Nusa Tenggara province in Indonesia provided the data and analyses presented in this chapter, delineating the extent to which fear played a decisive role in both internal, felt experience and social relations. Results illustrate how fear emotions are constructed and acted upon during times of crisis, arising from misinformation, rumour, socioreligious influence, long-standing tradition and community understandings of modernity, power and biomedicine. The chapter outlines several sociological theories on fear and emotion and interrogates a post-pandemic future.