This article reviews past studies on threat appeals from the viewpoint of protection motivation theory (PMT) proposed by Rogers (1975, 1983). First, four working hypotheses to test PMT were provided to arrange PMT in a systematic order. Then the findings from the experimental studies were reviewed on the basis of four hypotheses, the following trends were noted: 1) each of the communicative information (magnitude of noxiousness, probability of occurrence, effectiveness of coping response, and self-efficacy) initiates receivers' corresponding cognition independently, 2) four variables (severity, probability, response efficacy and self-efficacy) are positively related to and response costs is negatively related to persuasive effects, 3) however, there are some cases where increments in threat appraisal (severity or probability) have no effect or inhibit persuasive effects when coping appraisal (especially, response efficacy) is low, 4) cognitive variables explain larger proportion of the variance in persuasive effects than fear.
Finally, it was suggested that future studies should investigate the following two points: 1) the effects of rewards and response costs on threat appeals, and 2) conceptual overlap of each cognitive variable in PMT.
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