Fear Arousal

• persuasive messages can change attitudes and behaviour if they arouse fear into the recipient
• Dollard and Miller - suggested that fear motivates people to change their behaviour as fear creates unpleasant physiological and psychological arousal.
• Janis and Feshbach - fear arousal theory argues that the relationship between fear arousal and behaviour is curvilinear.

  No fear = no change in a behaviour

  Really high fear - no change in behaviour but denial occurs instead

  Moderate fear = change in behaviour
• Dabbs and Leventhal 1966 - fear arousal and tetanus vaccinations

  sent communications to students on the dangers of not being vaccinated against tetanus.

  low fear = you can recover from it without help

  high fear = you will die if you get it

  High fear arousal produced the most change
• Janis and Feshbach 1953 - fear arousal and dental hygiene

  200 dental students had a lecture on dental hygiene (3 experimental groups (strong-moderate-minimal) and 1 control group)

  Strong fear group were more worried than others but behaviour change shows

  • strong fear group - 8%
  • moderate fear - 22%
  • minimal fear group - 36%
• pro - fear is an important motivator of behaviour change - DABBS and LEVENTHAL found that high fear arousal produced the most change suggesting that it is not always counterproductive
• pro - measured changes in behaviour. - many studies of fear arousal do not measure changes in intentions but LEVENTHAL and SINGER (1966) found that fear arousal changes participants attitudes towards dental hygiene but they did not assess behaviour change

  May be that JANIS and FESHBACH's study has greater validity than studies that came to different conclusions
• con - evidence does not fully support fear arousal - study by janis and feshbach did confirm that high fear messages are counterproductive and also shown that the fear behaviour link is NOT curvilinear. - which undermines the validity of the fear arousal theory