Enhancing The Effectiveness Of Threat Appeals PSA

Drinking-driving behavior has caused great harm and huge economic losses on the community and the public.Every year,the organizations from various country invest a lot of money to anti-drink-driving public service ads(PSA).Therefore,it is worthy to studying how to enhance the effectiveness of such PSA.Currently,the study of PSA has focused on message framing.Threat appeal is one of the most common way.In a recent research,threat appeal target was divided into self-relevant and other-relevant.And there exist congruency effects between threatened target and relationship norms.So,what about audience characteristics?Based on audience characteristics,this study mainly discusses whether there exist congruency effects between threatened target and self-construal.Through priming self-construal,experiment 1 mainly explore the audience emotion response and attitude response under different threatened target(self-relevant and other-relevant)condition.In experiment 2,threatened target mainly focus on other-relevant(passerby-relevant and family-relevant).This study found that there exist congruency effects between threatened target and self-construal.In other words,when we priming independent self and presenting self-relevant message,the audience would show more fear.When we priming interdependent self and presenting other-relevant message,the audience would show more guilt.Experiment 2 also found that when threat message focus family specifically,the audience will show more guilt.