Tag Archives: fear

Currently reading about how appealing to fear is effective in positively influencing behavior, and hardly ever backfires (Tannenbaum et al., 2015). Who would have thought?

Fear can lead to fight, flight, or freeze responses — or so we often hear. So far, I was under the impression that fear was generally not a good emotion to create in students since from what I had read, it hinders learning. But my colleague Léa recently sent me the meta-analysis by Tannenbaum et al. (2015), and it turns out that fear appeals can and do actually positively influence behavior under almost all conditions, and they hardly backfire! Who would have thought?

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