6.5 Health Promotion

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Main Content

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Objective 1: Strategies in Health Promotion

What is health promotion?

Health promotion is any activity designed to improve people's health and encourage them to make healthier choices. It can involve campaigns, posters, school programmes, or workplace policies. Two key strategies used in health promotion are fear arousal and providing information.

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Strategy 1: Fear Arousal

What does it mean?

Fear arousal is a strategy that uses frightening or shocking messages to scare people into changing their behaviour. The idea is simple: if people are scared of what might happen to them (e.g., getting cancer, dying in a car crash), they will be motivated to avoid the risky behaviour.

How does it work?

Fear arousal campaigns usually show the negative consequences of a behaviour. For example:

• Anti-smoking adverts showing diseased lungs or people dying from cancer.
• Drink-driving campaigns showing graphic car crashes.
• Sexual health campaigns warning about serious diseases.

The message is: "This could happen to you — change your behaviour now."

Does it actually work?

The effectiveness of fear arousal depends on two things:

1. How severe the threat seems — The person needs to believe the health risk is genuinely serious.
2. Whether the person believes they can do something about it — This is called self-efficacy (a person's belief that they are capable of making the change). If someone is scared but feels helpless, they may simply ignore the message or feel too anxious to act.

This means high fear + high self-efficacy = behaviour change. But high fear + low self-efficacy = the message is ignored or causes denial (where the person refuses to think about the danger).

Key research point: Studies have shown that moderate levels of fear — not extreme fear — tend to be most effective. Extremely frightening messages can cause people to switch off because the threat feels too overwhelming.

Evaluation of fear arousal:

• ✅ Can be very effective when paired with clear, practical advice on how to reduce the risk.
• ✅ Grabs attention — emotional messages are memorable.
• ❌ If the fear is too high without guidance, people may deny the threat ("That won't happen to me").
• ❌ Ethical concerns — is it right to scare people, especially vulnerable individuals?
• ❌ Fear alone does not always lead to long-term behaviour change.