Use Of Fear Research Articles

Deprescribing benzodiazepine receptor agonists in older adults: a mixed-methods study to adapt the Canadian D-PRESCRIBE intervention to the Belgian community setting

ObjectiveGuidelines recommend deprescribing benzodiazepine receptor agonists (BZRA) in older adults, yet implementation in clinical practice remains limited. Adapting effective, evidence-based interventions to a new context is a resource-saving strategy. In...

Fear and Distress: How Can We Measure the Impact of Technology-Facilitated Abuse in Relationships?

Technology-facilitated abuse in relationships (TAR) is a relatively new form of intimate partner violence. Research exploring the impact of TAR on young people is limited, and while robust measures of TAR itself are emerging, measures of TAR impact lack evidence of validity. A mixed-methods approach was used to establish preliminary face and content validity for the measurement of TAR impact. Youth discussion groups (n = 38) revealed that (1) distress is favored over upset as a preferred measure of TAR impact, and (2) fear is an appropriate impact measure for some TAR behaviors. In an online survey, frontline practitioners (n = 171) perceived and subsequently rated a total of 54 TAR behaviors in the upper half of the severity range on fear and distress, with 6 behaviors ranking among each of the top 10 most fear- and distress-inducing behaviors. These findings provide evidence of both face and content validity for the use of fear and distress measures when seeking to understand the impact of TAR. Scholars, practitioners, and educators alike can use this evidence to enhance the validity of investigations into TAR and its impact, to support victims of TAR, and to improve TAR education among youth.

The effectiveness of sustainability social marketing use of fear and guilt appeals to influence the behavioural intention of millennials

PurposeThis study aims to understand if the appeals often used in social marketing, namely, fear and guilt, are effective in changing South African millennials’ intention to behave more pro-environmentally.Design/methodology/approachA primary quantitative research method was followed with a between-subject experimental design approach. The treatment took the form of fear- and guilt-based sustainability advertisements. Questions were asked in the form of a survey with the determinants of the theory of planned behaviour (TPB) model (i.e. attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioural control) as its constructs.FindingsAnalysis of the collected data revealed that adding the appeal of fear or guilt to advertisements does not significantly change South African millennials’ intention to behave pro-environmentally. Furthermore, a deeper analysis of the TPB model’s determinants showed that attitude had the strongest effect on behavioural intention. Also, the use of fear or guilt in sustainability social marketing does not affect the subjective norms of South African millennials.Research limitations/implicationsThe study offers a greater understanding of customer engagement and motivational factors in the mobile instant messaging (MIM) environment. Future studies could consider more complex relationships with customer engagement in using MIM apps focussed on a younger generation.Practical implicationsIt is therefore recommended that to significantly increase the South African millennials’ intention to behave pro-environmentally, social marketers should use other advertising tools or appeals, namely, positive attitude change.Originality/valueThe results of this study represent a contribution to the limited literature on TPB determinants and how they drive behavioural intention.

Fear and Violence, Loyalty and Treason: Settlement of Status in Syria

Abstract This article examines the arbitrary and oftentimes violent nature of loyalty and belonging in the case of Syria but with applicability to other authoritarian or high-surveillance contexts. It shows how the new “settlement of status” process is an extension of the governmentality of violence used by the Syrian regime to delineate loyal citizens from traitors. However, the article argues that this process is Janus-faced and actually serves to undermine the regime in the long run by destabilizing its surety around who is considered loyal and who is a potential threat. This uncertainty has the potential to sow the seeds for greater dissent and with it, act as one possible catalyst for the regime's eventual collapse. The Syrian case offers broader insights into the various social and political permutations of a citizen's relationship to the state and how that relationship can be impacted over time by the state's use of fear and violence as mechanisms for social control.

Surveillance Society: From Communist Czechoslovakia to Contemporary Western Democracies

Abstract Surveillance was long considered one of the main characteristics of communist rule. The ubiquitous presence of the secret police and its informants, citizens who would spy on their own family, friends, and colleagues, was one trait that was considered almost consubstantial to the exercise of communist repression. The regimes paralyzed the people by mobilizing fear: fear of repression, but also fear of the West, and fear of capitalism. But the participation of large chunks of society to this control culture, as well as its high level of conformism, progressively led to the postulate that the communist domination is no more than one particular avatar of modern society. Such an approach revives the notion of individual choice and that of social actors. As dissident thinkers underlined it, it would have been enough for people to question the official dogma, by refusing to live in a lie, for the regimes to collapse. However, surveillance practices have been studied also in Western countries in the past decades. And the recent coronavirus crisis shows yet again that the use of fear in politics is not a prerogative of communist regimes only. We can observe how potent fear is, also in our democracies, as a motivator of individual behavior and extractor of conformism. The ongoing coronavirus pandemic has increased the visibility of state and corporate surveillance, yet this new reality has garnered the massive support of the wider public. In fact, it has largely been a demand on the part of a fearful citizenry, who has voluntarily complied to this new surveillance and self-surveillance model. The communist experience should warn us that surveillance leads to censorship and, even more importantly, to a change of behavior. But the current Covid situation should also lead us to reinterpret the degree of sincerity of social actors under communism: we now see that fear can lead to curtailing freedoms with the willing participation of a large part of society.

Fear of Covid-19 Scale:

This study explores some empirical validity of the fear of the Covid-19 scale. The study intends to examine potential validity when the scale is used for young people attending higher education institutions in Indonesia. Researchers invited undergraduate students from five universities in Indonesia. Four hundred fourty five participants fully completed the survey within six weeks of data collection. The study was conducted online through an online survey platform where most participants completed the survey within 20 minutes. Two measures were employed, the fear of Covid-19 and the perceived stress scale. The results supported the theoretical measurement model in which fear of Covid-19 and perceived stress scale each represented a unidimensional construct. The Principal Component Analysis (PCA) also found that the fear of the Covid-19 scale generated positive loading factors for its items with an average variance extracted (AVE) higher than 50%. The Pearson's correlation's predictive validity study observed a positive and significant association between fear of Covid-19 and perceived stress. This study has provided initial empirical support for the use of fear of Covid-19 for young people who attend higher education institutions. The fear of the Covid-19 measure was also in line with several studies and the Conservation of Resource theory. People who perceive crisis will experience threats to their resources, and they will be more likely to experience stress if they do not have enough resources to cope with the threats.

Roundtable on Taboos and Advertising

Abstract: This roundtable brings together advertising scholars, educators, and practitioners to talk about taboos and advertising. Topics covered include the following: what a taboo means; how a taboo compares to a controversy; how taboos reveal cultural, social, and legal regulations; the need to consider the consequences of representing taboos in particular contexts; the use of fear and shock in advertising; the difference between fear and shock; representations of death in advertising; humor's effectiveness in talking about taboo topics; audiences' different interpretations of taboos; taboos within the advertising industry; and advice for practitioners, professors, and students. The article includes a discussion of many sample advertisements covering a range of subjects: bad breath ("halitosis"), biracial couples, body odor, child marriage, death, defecation, genitalia, guns, erectile dysfunction, HIV and AIDS, incontinence, LGBTQ+ people kissing, menstruation, sex, and yeast infections.

Страх як інструмент політики держави

The article analyses fear as an effective political tool. It is noted that fear can regulate domestic and foreign public policy. The use of fear in political governance through the use of certain technologies allows one to achieve the following: to identify vectors of political development, to change the regulatory framework, to reformat work with influence groups and public opinion leaders and to focus on certain values. Fear in political processes may be used to achieve either positive or negative goals. The author emphasizes the interconnection between fear and the weakening of democratic moods of the society. Fear reduces the "value" of a political regime that becomes undemocratic. It insists that fear pushes the state to violate its own moral principles, which are based on the law. This affects certain features and sets the level of development of political culture and the sense of its citizens. It is determined that the current fears which are used as the political tools are: migration; terrorism and use of weapons of mass destruction; economical crisis; natural disasters; threats to national security, war; uncertain future and others. Overstatement of the dangers and fueling fears for both: individuals and the state can slow down reforms, – as an obstacle to further development and reformation. For the state, this leads to the increase in costs which are necessary for the needless control and reinsurance, which, hence, leads to the significant use of human, material, financial and other resources. It shows how citizens’ fear of terrorist attacks is used to achieve a certain political goal. Emphasis is placed on various losses from terrorist acts, their comparison with other threats. It is emphasized that the use of fear in the management process can not only harm the development of society, but also can develop problems for the government itself. Fear is a tool that requires both special attention and careful planning of possible consequences.

Kafka’s Bureaucracy: Immigration Administrative Burdens in the Trump Era

Abstract What does a government do when it decides to make a public service as burdensome as possible? We consider this question in the context of immigration policy during the Trump administration. The case demonstrates the deliberate and governmentwide use of administrative burdens to make legal processes of immigration confusing, demanding, and stressful. Many of these changes occurred via what we characterize as formal administrative directives, a level of policy implementation that falls between high-level formal executive legal powers, such as executive orders or rules, and street-level discretion, pointing to the importance of processes such as memos and training as an understudied space of using burdens to make policy. The case challenges the standard portrayal of the principal–agent dilemma, given that the political principals engaged in a disruption of public services akin to sabotage, while the bureaucratic agents remained largely quiescent. The outcome was a system of racialized burdens, where changes were targeted at racially marginalized immigrants. The case also highlights the use of fear as a particular type of psychological cost.

Teachers use of fear appeals: Association with student and teacher mental health.

Fear appeals are discourses commonly used by teachers to motivate students especially when academic outcomes are paramount. Fear appeals have been associated with better and worse academic performance by the student recipients, with some evidence that fear appeals are detrimental for students who are anxious and have lower self-efficacy. Little is known about the factors that drive teachers' use of fear appeals beyond a desire to increase motivation to excel. This study examined the relationship between the use of fear appeals, psychological distress, and self-efficacy in both teachers and students. Participants were 377 students (81% female, age range 15 to 18, M = 16.68, SD = 0.49) and 96 teachers (73% female, Mean years teaching = 18.04, SD = 12.39). Participants completed surveys mid-way through the first school term of their final year of high school. Student surveys examined student anxiety, depression, stress, self-efficacy, and experience of teacher fear appeals. Teacher surveys examined teacher anxiety, depression, stress, emotional burnout, self-efficacy, years of teaching, and use of fear appeals. Teachers use of fear appeals was associated with student distress which was heightened for students with lower academic self-efficacy. Similarly, teachers' use of fear appeals was associated with higher anxiety and lower self-efficacy in teachers themselves. Therefore, the use and consequence of fear appeals is strongly linked to both student and teacher self-efficacy and distress. Given the detrimental impacts of fear appeals on academic performance in vulnerable students, more research is needed on the consequences of fear appeals.

COVID-19: The use of fear to control the pandemic

The ongoing Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has had a profound social and economic impact globally [1]. In retrospect, the widespread fear generated by the current pandemic is not so different from that of other pandemics not so long ago. Although fear is typically associated with misinformation and panic, which usually worsens the situation, the fear of COVID-19 can be used to prevent more infections if combined with accurate public health information.

The Wrath of Candidates. Drivers of Fear and Enthusiasm Appeals in Election Campaigns across the Globe

Little is known about why candidates decide to make use of emotional messages when campaigning for a political office, and under which conditions this is more likely to happen. We focus on the use of fear and enthusiasm appeals and assume that these are a function of profile of candidates and the nature of the context in which the election takes place. We use a new large-scale comparative dataset which includes information about campaigning strategies for 636 candidates having competed in 133 presidential and parliamentary elections in 101 countries between June 2016 and March 2020, based on judgments of 2000+ domestic and international experts. Our results show that candidates benefitting from a comparative advantage (incumbents and frontrunners) tend to rely on enthusiasm appeals, more extreme candidates prefer fear to enthusiasm, and more competitive races tend to foster the use of fear appeals. These findings have important implications for electoral competition, communication theory, and political marketing. All data and materials are openly available for replication. Supplemental data for this article is available online at https://doi.org/10.1080/15377857.2021.1930327 .

Content analysis of the use of fear in The Real Cost Youth E-cigarette Prevention Campaign

ABSTRACT Background The epidemic of youth electronic cigarette use has become an alarming public health concern. To address this urgent issue, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) launched ‘The Real Cost Youth E-cigarette Prevention Campaign’ in late September 2018 as part of the Youth Tobacco Prevention Plan to warn teens about the dangers of e-cigarette use. The campaign used digital and social media websites that are popular among youth, deployed video games hosted on a designated website, and distributed posters to schools across the country. Method We conducted a qualitative content analysis to assess whether the three venues and featured messages employed appropriate approaches. We utilized the existing literature and past successful campaigns to evaluate the campaign’s messaging to prevent youth e-cigarette use. Results The choice of communication venues was innovative and potentially effective. However, the campaign featured repeated use of fear-based messages in these advertisements. The campaign did not feature messages empowering youth and promoting specific healthy behaviors. Conclusion We propose more evidence-based messaging that features positive and empowering strategies for youth to model healthy behavioral changes and directly targeted campaigns with youth involvement against youth-targeting advertising and marketing by the tobacco industry. Accompanying the campaign, social policies directed toward youth need to be enacted to create synergy across youth e-cigarette prevention efforts. Moving beyond the outcomes of attitudes and beliefs, more research is needed to evaluate the impact of these enhanced population-wide communication strategies on reducing and preventing youth e-cigarette use.

The Uses of Fear: Notes on Boxing & Novels

The Uses of Fear: Notes on Boxing & Novels

The Use of Fear versus Hope in Health Advertisements: The Moderating Role of Individual Characteristics on Subsequent Health Decisions in Chile.

No studies have addressed the way the effectiveness of fear and hope advertisements differs across differently characterized individuals. The present study aims to find out in which situations related to different individual characteristics do fear and hope advertisements work as tools in generating healthy eating intention and physical activity intention. This study conducted an experiment using 283 adults from Chile. The results suggest that fear versus hope appeals in health advertisements have a more positive influence on healthy eating intention. The results suggest that the effect of fear advertisements on healthy eating intention is positively moderated by the frequency of fast food consumption and is negatively moderated by self-efficacy. The results suggest that fear versus hope appeals in health advertisements have no main effect on physical activity intention. However, the results suggest that the effect of fear advertisements on physical activity intention is positively moderated by perceived body weight and past healthy eating behavior and is negatively moderated by subjective norms. The results indicate that when making health advertising, homogenous messages are not persuasive for heterogeneous audiences. The present study results suggest that fear and hope advertisements should be delivered considering the individual characteristics identified in the present study.

Cancer Research UK’S obesity campaign in 2018 and 2019: effective health promotion or perpetuating the stigmatisation of obesity?

In 2018 and 2019 Cancer Research UK (CRUK) launched a controversial advertising campaign to inform the British public of obesity being a preventable cause of cancer. On each occasion the...

Just say know: Drug education and its publics in 1980s Britain

Until the 1980s, anti-drug education campaigns in the UK were rare. This article examines the reasons behind a policy shift that led to the introduction of mass media drug education in the mid 1980s. It focuses on two campaigns. ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ ran in England, and ‘Choose Life Not Drugs’ ran in Scotland. The campaigns were different in tone, with ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ making use of fear and ‘shock horror’ tactics, whereas ‘Choose Life Not Drugs’ attempted to deliver a more positive health message. ‘Heroin Screws You Up’ was criticised by many experts for its stigmatising approach. ‘Choose Life Not Drugs’ was more favourably received, but both campaigns ran into difficulties with the wider public. The messages of these campaigns were appropriated and deliberately subverted by some audiences. This historical policy analysis points towards a complex and nuanced relationship between drug education campaigns and their audiences, which raises wider questions about health education and its ‘publics’.

Love is an Emergency Savings Fund: Suze Orman’s Advice as Affective Discipline

AbstractAfter retiring from The Suze Orman Show, Suze Orman remained highly visible across media. Recently, she returned with her revised bestseller Women and Money (2018a) and a weekly podcast timed to coincide with #metoo. Across media, Orman has utilized the affect associated with feminine media genres, including self-help and makeover shows, to promote a lifestyle based on proper financial self-management. Her advice to women about marriage, motherhood, and filial duty makes it clear that such discipline is particularly gendered. Orman both uses and chafes against feminist discourses to frame finance as another problem to be managed for women. I understand Orman’s advice as affective through her use of fear, shame, and pride to promote individualized financialization at the expense of interpersonal relationships. My unique approach brings affect theory to financial media through analysis of Orman’s media texts.

Scoping the ethical principles of cybersecurity fear appeals

Fear appeals are used in many domains. Cybersecurity researchers are also starting to experiment with fear appeals, many reporting positive outcomes. Yet there are ethical concerns related to the use of fear to motivate action. In this paper, we explore this aspect from the perspectives of cybersecurity fear appeal deployers and recipients. We commenced our investigation by considering fear appeals from three foundational ethical perspectives. We then consulted the two stakeholder groups to gain insights into the ethical concerns they consider to be pertinent. We first consulted deployers: (a) fear appeal researchers and (b) Chief Information Security Officers (CISOs), and then potential cybersecurity fear appeal recipients: members of a crowdsourcing platform. We used their responses to develop an effects-reasoning matrix, identifying the potential benefits and detriments of cybersecurity fear appeals for all stakeholders. Using these insights, we derived six ethical principles to guide cybersecurity fear appeal deployment. We then evaluated a snapshot of cybersecurity studies using the ethical principle lens. Our contribution is, first, a list of potential detriments that could result from the deployment of cybersecurity fear appeals and second, the set of six ethical principles to inform the deployment of such appeals. Both of these are intended to inform cybersecurity fear appeal design and deployment.

“On the Development of Terrortory”

Deploying Indigenous imagery without including Indigenous peoples perpetuates the idea that these communities are of the past, erasing them from the present. Here, the authors explain it as “terrortory”, or the lawful use of fear and violence to alienate peoples and land for power.