The Present Studies
This research aims to evaluate the utility of fear appeals, by assessing their impact upon interpretation bias and intentions to adhere to COVID-19 mitigation measures. As such, this research will elucidate how to best communicate about the COVID-19 pandemic. To achieve this, two smaller pilot studies were conducted in student samples, followed by a large and well-powered study which recruited female participants from the community. The first pilot study was designed to validate a novel COVID-19 scale designed for this study and pilot our threat manipulation. The second pilot study sought to assess participant’s engagement with the articles in the online setting, by assessing memory for facts featured in the article. In our final study, participants were randomly allocated to read an article about COVID which was manipulated on threat and efficacy, before completing measures of interpretation bias and intentions to perform mitigation measures.Consistent with past research which has found that increasing threat or efficacy positively impacts upon health-related behaviours, we expected that:H1. Reading a threatening article would strengthen intentions to adhere to mitigation measures.H2. Intentions would be higher after reading an efficacy-boosting article.In addition to this:H3. Aligned with the EPPM, we hypothesised that there would be an interaction effect between efficacy and threat, such that the threatening message would be more effective when combined with the high-efficacy manipulation.H4. Consistent with the CBMHA, we expected that the threatening article would elicit greater COVID-related threat and a stronger health-threat interpretation bias.