The Impact of Emotional Responses to Public Service Announcements: The Case of Gun Violence in Schools

Abstract

We examine how people’s emotional reactions to gun violence public service announcements (PSAs) influence information acquisition, policy preferences, and political engagement. Utilizing a non-student sample of more than 100 participants, we look people’s emotional reactions (i.e., anger, sadness, contempt, and fear) to two Sandy Hook Promise PSAs. We assess people’s emotional reactions by relying on two complimentary measures: the traditional self-report measures as well as facial expression analysis. We demonstrate that when people are feeling sad after watching the Sandy Hook Promise PSAs, they are significantly more likely to retain information from a news article about school violence. Furthermore, feelings of contempt and fear lead people to seek out additional information about gun violence. In addition, we find when people feel anger, contempt, and fear after watching the PSAs, they change their views of gun policies. Finally, fear and contempt increase people’s likelihood of becoming politically mobilized.

Public service announcements: A literature review and way forward

“…Further, in the literature review, we found that predominantly 97 out of 119 papers were on PSAs dealing with health. Hence, we suggest that studies be conducted on PSAs in non-health related domains like gun violence (in the United States) (e.g., Fridkin et al, 2021), female infanticide (in developing countries) (Fuse & Crenshaw, 2006), the necessity of educating girls (in developing countries) (P. Paul, 2019) and climate change (for the entire planet) (Fawzy et al, 2020). Additionally, if PSA research collects qualitative data as well quantitative, it may use emerging techniques like fsQCA (Das et al, 2022).…”

“…Although the research on PSAs is vast and varied, this literature review identifies gaps, which we delineate in Table 8. PSA research has dealt with various issues like drunken driving (Becheur & Das, 2018;Blondé & Girandola, 2019;Schlegel et al, 1977) and antismoking (Kim, 2006;Shadel et al, 2010) (Cho et al, 2017;Clayton et al, 2017;Kim et al, 2018) or anti-gun violence (Fridkin et al, 2021). Future research can collect real-world data using surveys and in multiple contexts and cultures, to enhance generalizability.…”

“…82% of PSA research has been done using experiments. The bulk of these papers deals with single contexts like anti‐smoking (Cho et al, 2017; Clayton et al, 2017; Kim et al, 2018) or anti‐gun violence (Fridkin et al, 2021). Future research can collect real‐world data using surveys and in multiple contexts and cultures, to enhance generalizability.…”