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Behaviours
Published in Emmanuel Tsekleves, Rachel Cooper, Design for Health, 2017
Sarah Denford, Charles Abraham, Samantha Van Beurden, Jane R. Smith, Sarah Morgan-Trimmer
A wide range of techniques can be used to increase motivation. For example, fear appeals are often used to increase motivation for behaviours such as smoking cessation. Fear appeals increase motivation by making individuals aware of risk and the likely consequences of a specified behaviour (Witte and Allen, 2000). They are most likely to be effective when the target audience lacks motivation but has the necessary skills to perform the behaviour (Ruiter et al., 2001, 2004). If individuals are lacking in behavioural skills, fear is unlikely to be effective. Many smokers, for example, are highly motivated to stop smoking, but lack the behavioural skills to do so. Increasing fear without providing support to enable individuals to enact the behaviour increases anxiety because the individual is faced with a potentially severe threat that they believe they cannot avoid. One way to escape from this uncomfortable psychological state is to deny or undermine the relevance of the threat (‘it won’t happen to me’, ‘it’s all exaggerated’). Such defensive responses undermine rather than support change motivation (Rogers, 1975; Witte and Allen, 2000). It is important, therefore, to carefully assess the target population before using fear appeals and to ensure that they empower the target audience to avoid the emphasised threat.
Patient self-care
Published in Stephen Buetow, Person-centred Health Care, 2016
Fear appeals, for example, can illustrate a culture of potentially ‘coercive healthism’.14 Clinicians can be incentivized to cooperate, ostensibly for patients’ own good, and through the lure of receiving payments to include very sick patients in the denominators of performance metrics like cancer screening. Amid concepts like ‘preventionitis’ and the ‘health police’,15 this culture can cast patients adrift and drown their sense of autonomy. Loss of personal freedom persists for the sake of health even though much of health care – including contraception, fertility treatments, sports medicine and plastic surgery – has less to do with health than with healing or finding happiness and meaning in life. Despite this fact, self-care exclusively for health can suffocate rather than rescue patients. Vigilance in supporting uptake targets for cancer screening, for example, can save lives but also create patients who, ill-informed about screening risks, sink needlessly into the depths of worry about having medical conditions whose malignant potential may be unpredictable, and which they might be better off not knowing about and not having treated. In the absence of a personalized balancing of risks and benefits of individual forms of self-care, these shadows – real and imagined like those depicted in William Rimmer’s painting, Flight and Pursuit – can inappropriately frighten people into accepting unsafe health care to try to escape possible danger from disease they might not be able to avoid.
Psychology in practice
Published in Dominic Upton, Katie Thirlaway, Promoting Healthy Behaviour, 2013
Dominic Upton, Katie Thirlaway
Fear appeals are based on the fear-drive model which argues that fear is unpleasant and people want to avoid it. If a communication makes people feel fearful or anxious, as the advertisement in Photograph 2.3 is intended to do, then the fear-drive model suggests that the recipient will want to reduce this unpleasant state of mind. If the communication also contains advice, like the advertisement in Photograph 2.3, then individuals may try to follow this advice in order to escape from the unpleasant feelings of anxiety and fear for their future health. If following the behavioural advice leads to a reduction in fear then people are likely to continue with their changed behaviour.
‘From cover-up to catastrophe:’ how the anti-vaccine propaganda documentary ‘Vaxxed’ impacted student perceptions and intentions about MMR vaccination
Published in Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 2022
Amanda S. Bradshaw, Summer S. Shelton, Alexis Fitzsimmons, Debbie Treise
Future studies can assess and empirically explore how pro-vaccine messaging strategies could be used to combat each of these anti-vaccine messaging strategies in a future pro-vaccine campaign. For instance, to combat the fear appeal strategy, messages could depict an accurate risk-benefit analysis of vaccinations and not shy away from presenting the real risks of diseases. As vaccines have been deemed a victim of their own success [30], and many of these diseases are now uncommon, especially in the Western world, fear of side effects is more frequently discussed, while the diseases themselves are minimized and dismissed [44]. An effective two-sided vaccination messaging strategy, which parents have reported preferring and trusting [19] might first acknowledge there are inherent minor risks in vaccination (e.g. a high fever or soreness at the injection site), but then frame the statistics of the actual risk of vaccine side effects against the risks of major diseases, thus building trust in doctors, major medical organizations, and vaccines. Transparency about how the childhood vaccination schedule is rigorously tested and created, the research that goes into vaccine policy, and the legal process that exists in case an issue does occur could all prove helpful in rebuilding an even stronger, more solidified confidence in vaccines [44].
Stymied by a wealth of health information: How viewing conflicting information online diminishes efficacy
Published in Journal of Communication in Healthcare, 2019
Laura H. Marshall, Maria Leonora Comello
The EPPM proposes that an audience can be driven to act when perceptions of risk are coupled with ability to act (self-efficacy and response efficacy) to control those risks. When perceptions of efficacy diminish, a sense of uncontrollable risk may lead to negative consequences and counterproductive action. A recent meta-analysis of studies of fear appeals (public health campaigns utilizing frightening images or messages) showed, in fact, that ‘threatening information can cause people to engage in health-defeating behaviour’ [27]. Assessing efficacy may be particularly relevant for messages about cancer prevention and screening, since cancer is more likely to occur in older adults and more likely to be diagnosed later in those with fewer socioeconomic resources. Emanuel [28] found that some adults purposely avoided cancer screening, often because of a lack of sufficient coping resources. Those who feel less able to cope are more likely to avoid learning about their own cancer risk and less likely to follow recommended guidelines for cancer screening.
Social marketing and advertising appeals: On perception and intention to purchase condoms among college students
Published in International Journal of Healthcare Management, 2018
Kuan-Pin Chiang, Alison Chan, Ryan Milan
Some advertisements are designed to strike fear. Fear is defined as ‘an unpleasant often strong emotion caused by anticipation or awareness of danger and accompanied by increased autonomic activity’13 into the mind of the viewers. Such appeals have proven effective at increasing consumer interest and recall of an advertisement. Fear appeals with threatening information have the ability to motivate people to practice safer or more recommended behavior.3 They also have the ability to persuade and change consumers’ behavior, e.g., refusing to buy, vote, believe, support, learn, etc. a certain way, may cause some unknown or sometimes defined dire consequence to occur.14 Fear appeals are not just for advertisers. Since fear appeals are so persuasive, they are often effective motivators to get people to help themselves. Fear is one of the strongest and most basic human emotions used to protect people from uncomfortable or dangerous situations. Advertisements using fear appeals can warn people of some imminent danger. Often times, advertisers will use fear appeals as a way to sell products that claim they can protect users from such danger.3,15 Many social campaigns have turned to fear appeals when it comes to convincing people, mainly young people, to practice a healthier or safer lifestyle. Several studies have shown that the use of fear appeals is most effective when they contain a high level of threat that viewers feel they have the ability to reduce or prevent.3,15