Emotional Appeals in HIV Prevention Campaigns: Unintended Stigma Effects

The purpose of this study was to determine whether HIV/AIDS public service announcements (PSAs) that use emotional appeals have unintended effects of creating stigmatizing attitudes in their viewers.

We analyzed data for 240 respondents located in the United States who were recruited online. Respondents were randomly assigned to one of 3 conditions, where they viewed a PSA with hope appeals, fear appeals, or non-emotional appeals. Respondents then answered a series of questions about their attitudes about HIV/AIDS; testing behavior; engagement with HIV/AIDS-related people, organizations, and issues; and HIV/AIDS knowledge. We then performed MANOVA analyses and Pearson correlations.

There were no significant differences in stigmatizing attitudes and behavior across the 3 conditions. However, once the data were split by sex, men exposed to the hope condition had significantly higher stigmatizing attitudes towards people living with HIV/AIDS than men in the other 2 conditions.

This result was unexpected and suggests that further research needs to be conducted with a more robust sample size to account for any moderating influences that might explain why a hopeful message that communicates togetherness would have a negative attitudinal impact on male viewers.