Doctoral Dissertation Research in DRMS: Harnessing Anger to Promote Activism: Exploring the Efficacy and Emotional Flow of Persuasive Anger Appeals

战略传播者越来越关注如何激励公众和决策者采取行动，消除对人类和地球健康的明显威胁。为了激励公民参与健康和环境问题，传播者将受益于探索信息战略，超越对问题的信息描述，在情感层面上吸引受众。为此，本研究探讨了说服性愤怒上诉的可行性。根据说服理论，激起愤怒的信息不仅要唤起愤怒，以改变态度和行为;它们还必须灌输采取行动的有效性的信念。然而，该理论对这些功效信念的内涵并不精确。因为愤怒往往会激发对被认为是做错事的人进行报复的欲望，所以当观众相信某个特定的行为会惩罚做错事的人时，愤怒可能会对说服效果产生最强的影响，研究人员称之为报复效能。因此，我们期望愤怒呼吁最有效的时候是唤起对这些伤害的罪魁祸首的愤怒，然后传达建议的反应将如何有效地惩罚罪犯。在研究有说服力的愤怒诉求时，研究人员使用了两个问题，这两个问题在问题的严重性和集体解决方案的必要性方面存在科学共识。三项研究探讨了如何设计信息，利用对感知不公正的愤怒（称为道德愤怒），以及如何将这种情绪转化为行动主义。研究1采用横断面调查设计，以验证建议的报复效能的措施。研究2和3建立在第一项研究的基础上，通过实验测试灌输道德愤怒和报复效能的信息。此外，研究3探索了在暴露于这些信息期间，引发的愤怒在时间上演变的程度-一种称为情绪流的现象。研究结果为风险沟通者提供了直接的、理论指导，指导他们如何最大限度地有效地说服愤怒。这项研究也有助于我们对愤怒诉求的理论理解，与恐惧或幽默等其他情绪的诉求相比，愤怒诉求受到的学术关注要少得多。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Strategic communicators are increasingly interested in ways to galvanize the public and policymakers to take action to offset clear threats to human and planetary health. To motivate civic engagement with health and environmental issues, communicators would benefit from exploring messaging strategies that go beyond informational portrayals of an issue to engage audiences on an emotional level. To this end, this research explores the viability of persuasive anger appeals. According to persuasion theory, anger-arousing messages must not only evoke anger in order to change attitudes and behaviors; they must also instill beliefs about the efficacy of taking action. The theory, however, has been imprecise about what those efficacy beliefs entail. Because anger tends to motivate a desire to retaliate against a perceived wrongdoer, it follows that anger may have the strongest effects on persuasive outcomes when the audience believes that a particular action will punish the wrongdoer, a new concept the researchers call retributive efficacy. As such, we expect an anger appeal to be most effective when it evokes anger toward culprits of these harms and then communicates how a recommended response will effectively punish the offender. In examining persuasive anger appeals, the researchers use two issues for which there is scientific consensus about the magnitude of the problem and the need for collective solutions. Three studies examine how to design messages that harness anger about perceived injustices (referred to as moral anger) and how to translate that emotion into activism. Study 1 uses a cross-sectional survey design to validate a proposed measure of retributive efficacy. Studies 2 and 3 build on the first study by experimentally testing messages that instill moral anger and retributive efficacy. Additionally, study 3 explores the extent to which evoked anger temporally evolves during exposure to such messages -- a phenomenon called emotional flow. Study findings offer risk communicators direct, theory-informed guidance on how to craft maximally effective persuasive appeals to anger. The research also contribute to our theoretical understanding of anger appeals, which have received far less scholarly attention than appeals to other emotions like fear or humor.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.