Fear appeal effectiveness in antismoking campaigns: do anger and smoking matter?

ABSTRACT

Although fear appeals are widely used in health campaigns, empirical studies have produced conflicting results regarding their effectiveness. To understand the impact of fear appeal in health campaigns, this study investigates the relationship between fear, anger, and smoking status in the context of an antismoking campaign. Using a survey of 829 people in South Korea, this study tests the three-way interactive model with the PROCESS macro. Results indicate that the effect of fear on attitudes toward the campaign depends on the level of anger, and show that the impact of ‘anger-adjusted’ additional fear appears only among nonsmokers. Implications for antismoking advertising strategies are discussed.

KEYWORDS:

• Fear appeals
• anger
• antismoking campaign

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. While tobacco consumption has decreased in many Western countries over the past few decades (Gunter et al., 2020), South Korea has a much higher adult smoking rate (17.3%) than other countries, including the United States (11.4%) (OECD Indicators, 2017).

2. The required sample size is calculated using G*Power 3.1.9.7 program (Faul et al., 2009).

3. We focus on the unintended negative effects of fear-appeal advertisements against which smokers have filed a suit.

4. It is important to help adults maintain nonsmoking as well as to stop smoking, considering the specific context in South Korea where, for example, compulsory military service encourages people to initiate or continue to smoke due to the free cigarette distribution and social smoking culture (Allem et al., 2012). However, ex-smokers (n = 171, 17.1%) are excluded because they are motivated to quit by a more complex combination of factors including individual beliefs, norms, and other personal situations (Smith et al., 2015; De Wilde et al., 2017).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Ministry of Education of the Republic of Korea and the National Research Foundation of Korea NRF-2018S1A3A2074932].