Fear Arousing Anti-Drinking and Driving PSAs: Do Physical Injury Threats Influence Young Adults?

Few researchers have sought answers to questions of anti-drinking and driving public service announcement (PSA) effects, even though there is an ever-increasing, widespread public concern about youthful drinking drivers on the nation's highways. Building upon the general body of research on fear and persuasion, this experiment was undertaken to address the question of whether physical injury threats of varying intensity (i.e., high threat, moderate threat, low threat) and injury outcome focus (injury to self versus injury to others) produce differences in fear arousal among young adults and how fear, if aroused, affects cognitive, evaluative, and behavioral responses to anti-drinking and driving PSAs. As hypothesized, more fear was aroused by the high threat PSAs than the low threat PSAs. However, fear arousal did not carry-over to the cognitive, evaluative, or behavioral responses of young adult subjects to the PSA treatments. No differences were found across the treatments in support argumentat...