Rethinkin the Study of Fear Appeals: An Emotional Perspective

Abstract

A selective review of theories of fear appeals is carried out which concludes that these theories have gradually become divorced from the notion of fear. The forces that motivated that separation are examined and a set of arguments are advanced favoring a reunion of fear with a theory of fear appeals. As a means of achieving that union, emotion theory is reviewed and a set of axioms extracted. The axiomatic framework is then used to demonstrate how an emotional perspective on fear appeals might shed new light on this area of persuasion. Recommendations are offered for future studies of fear appeals.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 138 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.