Abstract

Fear appeals are a form of discourse that arouses emotional imbalance which triggers a desire to alleviate the ensuing uneasiness. Often, such appeals result in some forms of behavioural changes, at least temporarily. In public discourse, the behavioural changes are expected to be compliance towards the fear appeal advocations. Previous studies reveal that the effect of fear appeals is largely decided by threat-framing strategies (Furedi, 2006). This study examines how threat-framing strategies are constructed to produce fear appeals in public service announcement (PSA) videos. Data for our analysis comprise of 13 PSA videos from the Nature Is Speaking campaign that was launched in 2014. These videos use a unique narrative perspective, with Nature highlighting its superior power and its indispensability to humans. We adopt the Proximisation Theory (PT) proposed by Piotr Cap (2013) to identify instances of threat occurrences. According to PT, a threat occurs when an external agent or force, referred to as “the outside-deictic-centre” (ODC), is conceptualised as crossing the space to invade another central figure in the narrative, referred to in PT as “the inside-deictic-centre” (IDC). Our analysis reveals that through different choices of nouns and pronouns, Nature is constructed as the ODC that threatens humans, the IDC. The threat-framing strategies were often found to be amplified through analogies, assertions, rhetorical questions, and parallel structures. This study adds to our understanding of how fear appeal PSAs are constructed; future research needs to further examine the effectiveness of these PSAs through public surveys.