There are three curious aspects to Witte’s (1992) claim about the superiority of self-report measures of fear. First, she was describing Rogers’s (1983) view from the protection motivation explanation, which is disinterested in fear as an explanatory construct. Second, Witte admits that the correlation between self-report and physiological indicators of fear in Mewborn & Rogers (1979) is “quite modest” (p. 346). Clearly, one indicator cannot simply stand in for another. Finally, and most important, the EPPM predicts that the creation of emotional arousal and its reduction are central to determining fear control or danger control processes. Therefore, the substantial fluctuations of arousal during processing of a fear appeal are critically important data rather than unnecessary noise.
Summary Comments
* * *
In summary, the accumulated fear appeal literature indicate that this message type works for most audiences and topics, however, the predictions made by fear appeal explanations do not clearly match the accumulated data. Fear appeal explanations, however, have not been given a fair test in large part because of the inadequate operational definitions and research designs. Specifically, due largely to the highly cognitive nature of the entire literature, the important physiological processes presumed to mediate the relationship between fear appeals and responses have gone dramatically understudied.
Future fear appeal research, then, should gather physiological data concerning the arousal and reduction of fear during message processing. Some fear appeal explanations rely heavily on physiological responses such that a full accounting of these formulations is impossible without the messier, more complex data. Once collected, I suspect that physiological data will likely require additional theory building. As researchers generate evidence as to how physiology is involved (or not involved) in the processing of fear appeals, existing explanations will almost certainly be found wanting. Explanations that truly balance cognitive and physiological components of emotion are clearly needed to advance fear appeal scholarship to the next level. As Bradley and Lang (2000) note, “As a bare minimum, an experiment should include a sample measure from each major system: overt acts, language, and physiology” (p. 245).
Notes
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1. For example, assume that the additive contrasts were −1, 0, 0, and +1 for the low-low, low-high, high-low, high-high conditions respectively. For the multiplicative model, assume contrasts of -1, -1, -1, and +3 for the same conditions. Given that the multiplicative model contains the same main effects as the additive models, these two sets of contrasts are very strongly correlated (r = .82).
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CHAPTER 13
Narrative Persuasion
Helena Bilandzic and Rick Busselle
In the context of persuasion, narrative is most commonly considered in opposition to argumentation. This separation likely began with Aristotle’s distinction between logos and pathos, which has come to represent the domain of logic and reason on one hand, and emotion, poetry, and stories on the other (Herrick, 1997). Throughout much of the 20th century, persuasion connoted argument—the putting forth of claims and supporting evidence linked by rational or logical coherence (Salvador, 1994; Zarefsky, 1990). Conversely, narrative was thought of as a description of events and characters (Abbott, 2002; Bruner, 1986) presented possibly to enlighten, certainly to entertain. This distinction between persuasion and narrative also is reflected in the view of audiences as processing information in either a paradigmatic or narrative mode (Bruner, 1986). In the paradigmatic mode, audience members are thought to gather information, weigh facts, and evaluate arguments; while in the narrative mode, they are assumed to focus on understanding causally and chronologically related events played out by sentient characters (Padgett & Allen, 1997).
This dichotomy between argument and narrative may be heuristically useful. However, there are risks inherent in a two-mode view of messages or processing (Keren & Schul, 2009): Exclusionary definitions fail to recognize the presence of narrative elements in arguments and rhetorical elements in narratives. Consider that an argument may contain information, such as an example (e.g., Gibson & Zillmann, 1994), which audience members may process the same way they do narrative information. Similarly, a narrative may contain persuasive information that takes the form of an argument (e.g., Hoeken & Hustinx, 2009) or claims and evidence (e.g., Dahlstrom, 2010).
Narrative persuasion may not be a mutually exclusive alternative to other persuasive, rhetorical forms, or an alternative to traditional advertising or health messages. Instead, one can approach narrative persuasion from the perspective that much of human communication and interaction, including many forms of persuasive messages, contain narrative elements or may activate in audiences processes associated with narrative comprehension (Schank & Abelson, 1995; Schank & Berman, 2002). Over the past decade, research in advertising, health communication, and entertainment education has incorporated theoretical and methodological elements of narrative persuasion (e.g., Durkin & Wakefield, 2008; Escalas, 2007; Moyer-Gusé, 2008). Given this, our approach in this chapter is to explore how narrative elements manifest in different types of persuasive content, the degree to which people are aware of persuasive intent when diffused in narratives, and the mechanisms leading to narrative persuasion.
Defining Narrative in Light of Persuasion
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Narrative can be thought of, again broadly, as symbolic representation of events (Abbott, 2002; Ryan, 2007, see also Escalas, 1998). Abbott (2002) illustrates how a narrative can be as brief as a single sentence, such as “I fell down.” Explicitly, this communicates the occurrence of an event and suggests states that precede and follow: The narrator was standing and then, as a result of some mishap, found him- or herself on the ground. Similarly, a sketch of a ship wrecked on a rocky shore suggests that the vessel once sailed and that something happened, possibly a storm, which led to its current state. This definition of narrative can easily be applied to a broad range of potentially persuasive content, from a novel like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, often cited as changing attitudes about slavery prior to the United States’ Civil War (Strange, 2002) to a photograph of a wrecked automobile accompanied by a textual reference to alcohol. This broad definition of narrative emphasizes two elements that are not necessarily associated with other persuasive forms: the suggestion of a character or characters and the representation of an event or events. In the shipwreck example, the sketch may not include any humans. Yet, the ship’s passengers—at least a crew—are implied, as is the driver of a wrecked automobile.
Audiences do not receive stories passively. Instead, readers, viewers, or listeners construct the story’s meaning in their own mind; the result is referred to as the “realization” of the story (Oatley, 2002).
Story realization is the audience member’s cognitive and emotional understanding of events based on the text and their own pre-existing, relevant knowledge of the topic (Busselle & Bilandzic, 2008; Graesser, Olde, & Klettke, 2002). While the elements of the story exist in a text, the realization of the story exists in the mind of audience members as they experience the narrative. Bordwell (1985) describes a story as “the imaginary construct we create progressively and retroactively … the developing result of picking up narrative cues, applying schemata, and framing and testing hypotheses” (p. 49, also see Zwaan, Langston, & Graesser, 1995).
A minimalist definition of narrative as a representation of events will include a range of media formats, such as images, phrases, and advertisements, even though they commonly would not be thought of as narratives. Certainly, the depiction of a parent putting a bandage on a child’s scrape suggests characters and events, as well as several emotions. Such “drama ads” communicate a product’s features “through a story-like format” (Wentzel, Tomczak, & Herrmann, 2010, p. 511). Advertisements or marketing messages containing testimonials and examples also may take a narrative form when a typical person describes an experience with a product or situation (e.g., Martin, Wentzel, & Tomczak, 2008).
An alternative to this plot-focused definition is to consider narrative as a portrayal of the inner world of a character—his or her views, perspectives, emotions, motivations, or goals (Fludernik, 1996). Narrative that is based on this “experientiality” is independent of plot. For example, brief testimonials from cancer patients (e.g., Kreuter et al., 2010) about their current state represent a narrative. This definition emphasizes the notion of empathy (Zillmann, 1994, 2006) or identification with a character (Cohen, 2001; Murphy, Frank, Moran, & Patnoe-Woodley, 2011), which also are processes central to narrative experiences. Here, even a fear appeal message may be considered a narrative if, for example, it includes some type of victim statement (e.g., Slater, 1999). Considering that consumers of stories are often deeply moved by characters, it makes sense to extend the definition of narrative in this way.
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