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Raising the Alarm and Calming Fears: Perceived Threat and Efficacy During Risk and Crisis

This chapter highlights the important roles of perceived threat and efficacy when attempting to change people’s behavior during risk and crisis. Toward this end, and using hurricane preparedness as its primary example, the balance of the chapter focuses on one useful tool for developing effective health-risk messages; the Extended Parallel Process Model (EPPM). The chapter begins with an overview of the EPPM, including an example application and a brief review of the numerous risk-communication topics to which it has been applied. It then discusses the concepts of collective efficacy and societal level risk judgments, and suggests a slight extension of the EPPM to include these two constructs. For the women, the threat and efficacy components were both personal. Results showed that men could be motivated by indirect fear appeal messages with a threat that did not necessarily affect them directly. Research on the phenomenon of sociotropic voting provides some insight into the impact of individuals’ collective level judgments of issues.