Threat appeals in public service announcements: Effects of message framing and relationship norms

Threat appeals have been widely utilized in numerous types of public service announcements (PSAs), and previous research has focused on the impact of the inherent messages in these announcements. By examining the research on the effects of framing PSAs in terms of the threat of the message to oneself or others, we proposed a clear conceptualization of “threat‐target framing.” The first two studies addressed the direct effects of threat‐target framing and found that other‐oriented threat appeals can evoke more guilt than can self‐oriented threat appeals. Moreover, self‐oriented threat appeals can evoke more fear and immediately direct recipients' attention to the smoker than can other‐oriented threat appeals. Study 3 reported that a contextual factor—relationship norms—was introduced as a potential moderating factor. Results showed that relationship norms had the potential to moderate the effect of threat‐target framing on recipients' fear response, but not the effect on recipients' guilt and coping response. In sum, the results highlighted the importance of message framing of advertising copies and the placement context. Our findings may be useful in understanding the antecedents of the persuasiveness of PSAs.