Editor’s essay: From anxiety to action

The articles in this issue illustrate various reasons why people may feel anxious or stressed: societal changes, health concerns, social activism, relationships, crises, etc. In short, today’s world appears to offer no shortage of opportunities to feel anxious.

Stress and anxiety

One study by the American Psychological Association (2017) revealed that 63% of Americans indicated “the future of the nation” to be a significant source of stress, whereas 62% were stressed about money, 61% about work, and 57% about the “current political climate” (p. 1). One year later, the numbers rose to 69% reporting significant stress about the future of the nation, 64% about both work and money, and 62% about the current political climate (American Psychological Association, 2018). In short, stress levels are rising in general, at least in the United States.

In some respects, of course, feeling stressed to some extent is normal, because “stress is how the brain and body respond to any demand” (5 Things You Should Know About Stress, n.d., n.p.), and “occasional anxiety is an expected part of life” (National Institute of Mental Health, 2018, n.p.). Defined as “apprehensive uneasiness or nervousness usually over an impending or anticipated ill” and “mentally distressing concern or interest” (Merriam-Webster, 2019, n.p.), anxiety happens to us all, at one point or another.

One common instrument used by researchers to measure anxiety is the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory (STAI) originated by Spielberger, Gorsuch, and Lushene (1970). Extending the conceptual usefulness of the STAI, Siddaway, Taylor, and Wood (2018) found that anxiety can be measured not merely by its presence or absence, but rather on a continuum of anxiety-calmness.

Acceptance and action

Indeed, keeping calm is one way to oppose the impact of anxiety. Specific anxiety-management strategies recommended by the Anxiety and Depression Association of America (n.d.) include: accepting the inability to control everything; maintaining a positive attitude; getting enough sleep and exercise; taking deep breaths; and getting help from family, friends, and professional healthcare providers.

Recent studies show that effective strategies for handling anxiety include forms of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT; cf. Bluett, Homan, Morrison, Levin, & Twohig, 2014; Swain, Hancock, Hainsworth, & Bowman, 2013). For example, Dehghani, Saf, Vosoughi, Tebbenouri, and Zarnagh (2018) found that sports competition anxiety was decreased in students who underwent a mindfulness- and acceptance-based intervention. Monteiro, Fonseca, Pereira, Alves, and Canavarro (2018) found that women who were more accepting of their situations and of themselves in the form of self-compassion were less likely to develop anxiety and depression post-partum.

Hayes, Luoma, Bond, Masuda, and Lillis (2006) conceptualized ACT as being composed of six core processes: acceptance, defusion, contact with the present moment, self as context, values, and committed action. Committed action is a pattern of “effective action linked to chosen values” (p. 9). On a similar note, the American Psychological Association (2018) reported that people have been taking action in response to their stress, with 70% of respondents indicating intention to vote and 57% having taken some kind of action in the last year, such as volunteering or supporting a cause, signing a petition, or speaking with family and friends about political views.

I wonder if public relations scholarship would benefit from using the extensively validated STAI (cf. Lonner & Ibrahim, 1989) to investigate anxiety as part of our own ongoing research into the role of emotions in the formation of publics (see, for example, Coombs & Holladay, 2005, 2007; Jin, Pang, & Cameron, 2010; Kim & Niederdeppe, 2013). In addition, while committed action as a core process of ACT strategies has very specific connotations in the field of cognitive and behavioral therapy, public relations scholars might consider ways in which this process, as generated in individuals, might extrapolate to organizational publics responding to anxieties of their own.

• “Public Relations and Social Morality as National Identity: A Cultural-Economic Examination of the US Government’s Fight Against Venereal Disease in the 1920s”

William Anderson offers a fascinating examination of three health campaigns conducted by the US Public Health Service in the 1920s to encourage positive social behaviors in a time of social change. His findings underscore the importance of studying producer motivation or intent as a means to clarify the moment of production in the cultural-economic model (CEM) of public relations (cf. Curtin & Gaither, 2005, 2007). Because all five moments are interconnected, the influence of motivation on the moment of production also implies its influence on regulation, representation, consumption, and identity.

Indeed, this historically focused article on the crafting of national identity via public relations efforts feels to me quite contemporary, given its examination of that identity during a moment of cultural concern regarding its future. As Anderson explains, the post-WWI increase in immigration (from non-English-speaking countries) and the migration (of African Americans) to cities from rural areas were social forces that appeared to some conservatives to be “changing what it meant to be American” (p. x, emphasis original), and one can hear strong echoes of that perspective in our own current events.

Methodologically, the article demonstrates how an historical case study can extend theory in public relations, while emphasizing the importance of avoiding presentism, or judging the past by the standards of the present. I appreciated the author’s reminder of the warning articulated by Lamme and Russell (2010), that public relations scholars avoid a linear approach that treats the history of our discipline as “progressive evolution” (p. 281), in which past practices are viewed as being less sophisticated and less ethical, compared to today’s public relations activities.

• “From Concerned Citizens to Activists: A Case Study of 2015 South Korean MERS Outbreak on the Role of Dialogic Government Communication and Citizens’ Emotions on Public Activism”

Anyone keeping up with current events will be unsurprised by the key finding in this study by Minjeong Kang, Jangyul Robert Kim, and Heewon Cha, that “anger, anxiety, and cynicism significantly motivated citizens’ intentions to take actions against the government” (p. x.). What I found particularly interesting was that, although anger, anxiety, and cynicism all predicted intentions of activism, only cynicism predicted actual activism behaviors (and in a negative direction). This article also elucidates the complex roles played by other variables in the process of getting people from cognition to affect to behavior, including perceptions of dialogic communication, distrust in government, and situational uncertainty.

This article demonstrates a thoughtful, nuanced treatment of various related concepts and offers the opportunity to review good practices in moving from the conceptualization to the operationalization of variables. For example, when asked by reviewers during the review process to explain why some variables in the study were treated as summative indices and others were not, the lead author explained, “Anger and anxiety are emotions and to capture the intensity of emotions, summative indices (cumulative) were used for them, while cynicism is a political sentiment, [for] which each item of the scale captured [a] slightly different aspect of the cynical political sentiment” (Kang, 2018, n.p.). The article offers Dillard and Anderson (2004) to justify the summative indexing of emotions and Dean, Brandes, and Dharwadkar (1998) to support the notion of cynicism as multidimensional.

Extending public relations theory into non-English-language terrain, the authors also discuss the connotative distinctions between two related terms in the Korean language: So-Tong (communication) and Dae-Wha (dialogue). What can English-language scholarship in public relations learn from these distinctive Korean words? What are the theoretical implications of exploring English-language-grounded concepts in a non-English language (cf. Sha, 2017)? I look forward to future studies shedding light on these questions.

• “The Influence of Distal Antecedents on Organization-Public Relationships”

In their article, Trent Seltzer and Nicole Lee extend the conceptual clarity of the notion of relational antecedents by offering a conceptual model of organization-public relationship (OPR) processing, while taking care to note that their study centers on OPR perceptions and is delimited to the empirical investigation of only a portion of the full conceptual model. Drawing on literature from motivated processing and perceived congruence, the authors integrate these concepts with extant OPR scholarship to assert that relational antecedents fall into two categories: Antecedents can be distal, such as those that motivate the initiation of relationships, or proximal, such as those that cultivate and manage relationships after they are established.

The authors empirically investigate five types of potential motivations for people to initiate a relationship with an organization: perceived social and/or cultural expectations, perceived expectations of valued others, perceived need for resources, perceived need for risk reduction, and perceived legal obligation to associate (cf. Broom, Casey, & Ritchey, 1997, 2000). The findings point to the importance of perceptions of social/cultural expectations in initiating the establishment of relationships between individuals and the various focal organizations studied, regardless of organization type.

In addition, this study’s finding that “perceived value congruence accounted for the most unique variance” (p. x) in OPR perceptions poses interesting questions for future scholars. For example, given the importance of value congruence as suggested by this study, research on corporate social values and corporate social responsibility would benefit from thoughtful consideration of those concepts as potential distal antecedents to OPRs. I would also love to see future research implementing the suggestion of Seltzer and Lee (2018) to “consider the lifespan of an OPR” (p. x). After all, if relationships can be initiated, can’t they be terminated?

• “Hierarchical Consistency of Strategies in Image Repair Theory: PR Practitioners’ Perceptions of Effective and Preferred Crisis Communication Strategies”

The article by Denise P. Ferguson, J. D. Wallace, and Robert C. Chandler examines the message strategies propounded by Benoit’s (1995, 1997) image repair theory (IRT) for organizations to use in responding to crises. The authors also provide a solid overview of Coombs (2007) situational crisis communication theory, which connects the IRT strategies for organizational responses in crises to three clusters of situation types differentiated by the extent to which publics attribute responsibility for the crisis to the organization: victim cluster, accidental cluster, and preventable cluster. The piece also reminds scholars of more recent scholarship (e.g., Kim & Sung, 2014) recommending that all organizations facing crisis management provide instructing and adjusting information (i.e., a base response), before selecting reputation management responses.

This study contributes to public relations theory by its explicit inclusion of silence as a message response strategy and its finding that silence was least or second-to-least likely to be recommended by practitioners as a message response strategy. The findings also were interesting in the apparent stability of rankings of practitioners’ perceptions of the effectiveness of crisis response strategies across three scenarios, thus begging the question of whether the situational crisis communication theory remains relevant in its emphasis on the situational. That said, it’s also possible that these results were the product of a relatively limited set of three crisis scenarios. Nevertheless, the study’s findings suggest that scholars examining the motivations for crisis responses should look less at ethical or motivational concerns and more at pragmatic reasons why practitioners choose and recommend the use of specific crisis response strategies.

Methodologically, the authors used the membership list of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) as their sampling frame, which reflects similar approaches to data collection done in the past on public relations practitioners. Yet, obtaining permission to use membership lists from professional associations has become increasingly difficult, and the limitations of this method—as noted by the authors—are real. Prior research has shown demographic differences between PRSA organizational membership and the population of those claiming to practice public relations in the United States, as documented by census data (e.g., Hazleton & Sha, 2012). I support the authors’ call for shorter survey instruments and also encourage the incorporation of attention-check items in longer questionnaires, to prevent potentially rote selection of answer options by fatigued respondents.

In addition to thanking all the reviewers who provided input in calendar year 2018 on manuscripts submitted to this journal, I thank especially those reviewers of articles published in this issue:

G. Kevin Han, Iowa State University

Arunima Krishna, Boston University (Massachusetts)

Liang Ma, Texas Christian University

Diana Knott Martinelli, West Virginia University

Tim Penning, Grand Valley State University (Michigan)

Lynn Zoch, Radford University (Virginia)

Two reviewers who requested their identities remain blinded (North America)