A Study Of The Effects Of Threat Types And Thestate Of Subject On Fear Appeals Anti-smoking Advertisements

Fear appeals can be defined as persuasive communication attempting to arouse the recipients’ fear in order to promote precautionary motivation and self-protective action. There are many influence factors in the fear appeals, and these factors are very complex. Previous researchers mainly focused their attention on message variables to study its impacts on the relationship, neglected the effects of personality variables and the interaction of them.The paper reviewed the previous research literature of fear appeals in the past sixty years in the western academia. Based on fear appeals literature, a development path about the model of fear appeals is constructed. Under the theoretical models’ guidance, the paper designed an experiment to explorer the impact of advertising effectiveness on threat types and the state of subject. we summarized the main conclusions of this research, pointed out some advice for future development of the public service ads.First, select 60 subjects from internet for the pre-test at random,6 invalid questionnaires were excluded, finally 56 were effective. The pre-experiment selected 4 available advertising images for formal study. The formal study adopted a pretest-post test design of 2(threat types: self-directed threat, other-directed threat) x 2(smoking status: smoking, un-smoking) x 2(gender: male, female),the dependent variables are the level of fear arousal and advertising effectiveness which include the attitude change about smoking and the intent change. The study used online test and offline test simultaneously, we have sent out 240 questionnaires which include 100 online questionnaires and 140 printed questionnaires. The post-test was proceed after two weeks, invited the subjects in pre-test to participate the post-test. Matching process was carried out on the pre-test and post-test, after rejected the useless questionnaires,finally 223 questionnaires were effective. The research results indicated that:(1) The status of smoking and gender separately affect recipient’s fear arousal. We found the non-smokers experienced more fear than smokers, and that the females experienced a higher level of fear than males.(2) In fear arousal, threat types and smoking status have a great interactive effect. For the smokers, exposed the self-directed threat ads have more fear than other-directed threat ads. And for the non-smokers, exposed other-directed threat ads will perceived more fear.(3) The status of smoking has a great difference in advertising effects. The non-smokers have more attitude change and intent change than smokers after viewing the fear appeals advertisements.(4) In advertising effects,the interaction between threat types and smoking status is obvious. For the non-smokers, the effect is better when presented other-directed threat ads. And for the smokers, exposed self-directed threat ads will have better effects than other-directed threat ads(5) The mediating effect of fear arousal on the smoking status with the effectiveness of fear appeal ads is significant. The recipients perceived more fear, the advertising effects are better.