Targeting Smartphone Use While Driving: Drivers’ Reactions to Different Types of Safety Messages

Only a few previous studies analyzed the effectiveness of road safety messages targeting smartphone use while driving and only several of them used messages from an ongoing road safety campaign. Thus, contributing to the field, this study aimed at testing the effectiveness of two types of social messages (threat appeal and threat appeal together with safe behavior role modelling) targeting smartphone use while driving. Ninety-three drivers were randomly assigned to two experimental (n1 = 26; n2 = 37) and one control (n = 29) groups. Each experimental group was presented with one 30 s length video message to reduce or stop smartphone use while driving. Messages differed in terms of threat appeal and modelling of safe behavior. The control group was presented with a 30 s length video clip showing neutral driving related content. The results revealed that threat appeals (alone or together with a safe role model) resulted in less positive emotions when compared to the control group’s reported emotional reactions. The message with threat appeal only also resulted in more negative emotions compared to the control group. With regards to behavioral intentions, road safety messages used in this study had minor effectiveness: the threat appeal message reduced the intentions to use smartphones while driving, only when previous behavior has been controlled. In sum, messages targeting smartphone use while driving were effective at least to some extent in changing drivers’ emotions and intentions not to be involved in targeted behavior, but the effect was minor and threat appeal only showed higher effectiveness.

Laymen’s Narratives in Amouddou’s Eco-documentary: An Ecolinguistic Analysis

Documentary films, generally of short or medium-length, have informative and educational purposes. They present authentic reports on areas of life, human activities, and the natural world. Particularly, eco-documentaries aim to raise environmental awareness towards the degradation of natural elements; they present alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation. To reinforce the argumentative process of environmental documentaries, laymen discourse contributes a lot to the meaning-making of productions. Within the framework of discourse analysis and ecolinguistics, this work examines fear and threat expressions used by ordinary witnesses to reinforce argumentation in Lahoucine Faouzi’s eco-documentary entitled “Whining of the Blue Lagoon. In this vein, the ‘perceived severity and perceived susceptibility’ model was used to investigate the implication of fear and threat appeals in laymen’s testimonies. The results show that these expressions are common among laymen’s narratives. This study has many implications for eco-documentary makers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research to explore other linguistic features in eco-documentaries on man’s perpetrated damages to the environmental resources.

THE EFFECTIVENESS OF SOCIAL ADS TARGETING DRUNK DRIVING

"Social advertisements with threat appeals are widely used to reduce drunk driving. However, research on the effectiveness of such advertising is limited. This study aimed to evaluate, what emotions cause threat appeal ads targeting drunk driving and whether these ads change risky driving attitudes. 41 students (17.1 percent males; mean age 20.9 years; 53.7 percent had a driving license) voluntarily participated in the experimental study. Every participant was randomly assigned to one of three groups: two experimental (watched one of two TV ads with threat appeals) or control group (watched car wash ad with no threatening stimuli). After watching one of three ads, all participants were asked to evaluate seven emotions and to fill in Driving Attitude Questionnaire (DAQ). Results revealed that both road safety threat appeal ads targeting drunk driving did not arouse any stronger fear emotions or differences in driving attitudes compared to control group. Both experimental groups didn’t differ in emotions or attitudes as well. No difference in emotions and attitudes was found when comparing the reaction of participants who have seen the specific ad before the experiment and those who haven’t. The fact of being a licensed driver was also not related to the level of reported emotions or attitude differences in both experimental groups. The study results reveal that the possible effectiveness of threat appeal ads from ongoing social marketing campaigns on reducing drunk driving is questionable and further studies are needed."

The role played by health resistance, coping response, and smoke damage perceptions in smoking threat appeal campaigns

Threat appeal campaigns have been widely used to induce people to change their bad smoking habits by adopting a better approach in favor of a healthier lifestyle. Social marketers who create this kind of messages tend to believe in the persuasive power of fear arousal. For most people, fear has an important consequence on behavior, leading them to search for means of deleting or coping with the unhealthy behavior. As demonstrated by the Ordered Protection Motivation Model, individual differences such as health resistance play an important role in determining, or not, a change of behavior when faced with the threat. This study explores the relationship between health resistance and attitude towards smoking behavior and examines the mediating impact of coping response and smoke damage perception in a sample of 260 university students, smokers and non-smokers. Results highlight that health resistance has an important direct effect on smoking attitude, but, it seems to be mitigated by the smoke severity of the damage shown in graphic images. The comparison between smokers and nonsmokers allowed us to understand the role of reactance in these two groups, and the significance that anti-smoking campaigns assume. Our results offer important suggestions for future decisions about social threat appeals campaigns.

Environmental Discourse in Moroccan Eco-documentary: The decryption of Scientists’ Narratives

Eco-documentary is a media genre that aims to raise environmental awareness among the general public. It exposes environmental degradations and presents alternatives for environmental issues such as pollution, global warming, and deforestation among others. For this aim, the language of scientific experts contributes a lot to the making of the argumentative flow of the documentary. Within the framework of ecolinguistics, this article examines fear and threat expressions used by scientists to reinforce argumentation in Faouzi’s (2012) entitled /الزرقاء المرجة انين: Whining of the Blue Lagoon/. In this direction, Witte, Cameron, McKeon, & Berkowitz's (1996) model of "perceived severity" and "perceived susceptibility" was adopted to explain the use of fear and threat appeals in the film. The results show that ‘perceived severity’ and ‘perceived susceptibility’ expressions are preponderant in experts’ discourse. This study has many implications for eco-documentary producers, governmental and non-governmental organs, and future research in Morocco to explore other facets of films that report about man’s damages perpetrated to environmental settings and resources.

How Scary Are Threat Appeals? Evaluating the Intensity of Fear in Experimental Research

One long-standing concern holds that much is unknown about the operation of threat appeals because practical and ethical matters preclude the use of seriously frightening messages. This project compared the intensity of fear produced by experimental messages with that produced by adverse events, such as wars and hurricanes. Results showed that threat appeals (k = 80; N = 6,738; Δ = 2.15) have been effective at inducing levels of fear that are on par with the fear induced by real-world occurrences (k = 19, N = 4,928, Δ = 2.01). Thus, the positive, linear association between threat (X) and persuasion (Y) observed in previous meta-analyses is probably an accurate characterization of the X-Y association: a finding that is inconsistent with inverted-U theories. The distribution of fear values produced by the experimental messages provides empirical benchmarks for future research.