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Objective: The goal was to examine the effectiveness of fear language in the protective action recommendation of an emergency warning, which instructs people how to prepare and stay safe. Background: Past work is limited because it has focused on describing the severity of the weather crisis, not improving the recommendation. Likewise, other research has examined fear appeals that overemphasize death, which leads to poor risk perceptions. Method: In Experiment 1, the presence of fear language and second-person personal pronouns (i.e., "you") in a recommendation was manipulated. Experiment 2 examined how fear language and a hurricane changing in intensity influenced risk perceptions across three decision points. Results: Experiment 1 suggested that fear language was more influential than a pronoun on risk perceptions. Experiment 2 suggested that fear language in a protective action recommendation was most impactful in the case of a hurricane decreasing in intensity. Conclusion: Protective action recommendations with fear language influence risk perceptions and behaviors. The magnitude of this influence is dependent on how people have categorized the hurricane (i.e., low vs. high risk). Application: These results demonstrate that fear appeals in hurricane warnings can be useful, especially in cases when a low to medium risk event is still extremely dangerous. Likewise, these results demonstrate a need for caution, as fear appeals are not a "one size-fits-all" approach to increasing risk perceptions and should be used thoughtfully. Recommendations of when to use fear appeals in protective action recommendations are provided based on the present data. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: The goals of this study were to assess the risk identification aspect of mental models using standard elicitation methods and how university campus alerts were related to these mental models.Background: People fail to follow protective action recommendations in emergency warnings. Past research has yet to examine cognitive processes that influence emergency decision-making.Method: Study 1 examined 2 years of emergency alerts distributed by a large southeastern university. In Study 2, participants listed emergencies in a thought-listing task. Study 3 measured participants' time to decide if a situation was an emergency.Results: The university distributed the most alerts about an armed person, theft, and fire. In Study 2, participants most frequently listed fire, car accident, heart attack, and theft. In Study 3, participants quickly decided a bomb, murder, fire, tornado, and rape were emergencies. They most slowly decided that a suspicious package and identify theft were emergencies.Conclusion: Recent interaction with warnings was only somewhat related to participants' mental models of emergencies. Risk identification precedes decision-making and applying protective actions. Examining these characteristics of people's mental representations of emergencies is fundamental to further understand why some emergency warnings go ignored.Application: Someone must believe a situation is serious to categorize it as an emergency before taking the protective action recommendations in an emergency warning. Present-day research must continue to examine the problem of people ignoring warning communication, as there are important cognitive factors that have not yet been explored until the present research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

FEATURE AT A GLANCE: There are many known problems with inappropriate response to emergency warnings. Recommended actions are not always properly followed, and sometimes emergency warnings are not taken seriously. A variety of psychological individual differences can influence the perception of emergency warnings. At present, warning distributors do not consider how these factors affect emergency warning response. We recommend that emergency warning distribution systems be developed that account for these differences to improve response. To this end, we propose four guidelines supported by psychological research and inspired by currently available technologies. These guidelines frame a user-centered approach to more appropriately tailor warning messages for each recipient. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The United States military services are modernizing their training and education curricula by leveraging advances in technology to deliver instruction that is more engaging and responsive to trainees' needs and better prepares them for the future fight. Adaptive training (AT), or training tailored to the strengths and weaknesses of individual trainees, is a promising technique to meet these modernization goals. The research literature, however, is sporadic and does not clearly prescribe best practices for its employment. Therefore, we conducted a meta-analysis to examine the effectiveness of various AT instructional interventions (i.e. adapting difficulty, feedback, scaffolding, etc.) on learning outcomes. There were 30 peer-reviewed publications included in the analysis. We grouped studies by the adaptive intervention examined and reported the associated effects on learning outcomes. Overall, the results revealed that the effectiveness of AT varied considerably across the instructional interventions. Specifically, studies that implemented adaptive difficulty techniques were the most effective, followed by adaptive scaffolding and remediation/test-out techniques. Based on these findings, we identify design recommendations for future AT systems.