Abstract：
Government health messaging is significant to the containment of public health crises. Such communication may benefit from using fear appeal, a message strategy for promoting health and preventing diseases. Yet little scholarly attention has been paid to how fear appeal is employed in government messaging to promote social media engagement through online actions including likes, shares, and comments. These actions play a meaningful role in addressing communication exigencies within the context of health crises. In this study, quantitative content analysis and corpus linguistics methods were employed to analyze fear appeal-related elements in COVID-19 messages sent by a state-owned media outlet on social media. The results show that when compared to messages without threat, messages conveying threat elicited significantly more comments, in which emotions and perceptions to threat and efficacy were exhibited, while messages containing both threat and efficacy generated more engagement in comparison to messages with threat alone. Moreover, while subdimensions under efficacy were positive predictors of engagement, those under threat were primarily found to have exerted negative effects. The findings provide insights into how fear appeal elements can be employed in government health crisis communication to engage the public.
摘要：
政府健康信息对于遏制公共卫生危机具有重要意义。这种沟通可能会受益于使用恐惧上诉，促进健康和预防疾病的信息战略。然而，学术界很少关注政府信息中如何通过包括点赞在内的在线行动来促进社交媒体参与，股份,和评论。这些行动在解决健康危机背景下的通信紧急情况方面发挥了有意义的作用。在这项研究中,采用定量内容分析和语料库语言学方法对一家国有媒体在社交媒体上发送的COVID-19信息中的恐惧诉求相关要素进行分析.结果表明，与没有威胁的消息相比，传达威胁的消息引起了更多的评论，表现出对威胁和效能的情感和感知，与仅具有威胁的消息相比，同时包含威胁和功效的消息产生了更多的参与。此外，虽然功效下的子维度是参与度的积极预测因子，受到威胁的人主要被发现产生了负面影响。这些发现提供了有关如何在政府健康危机沟通中使用恐惧上诉元素以吸引公众的见解。
