"You may be trapped forever...set yourself free!" Eliciting mixed emotions to encourage help-seeking behaviour in gambling-afflicted individuals

This study takes a social marketing perspective to investigate emotional advertising effectiveness by considering impacts of fear, challenge and fear mixed with challenge appeals on help-seeking intentions (BI) in at-risk gamblers. Fear mixed with challenge produced significantly larger BI means in comparison to fear or challenge appeals in at-risk gamblers. The authors applied latent moderated structural equation modelling to test direct and indirect impacts of fear mixed with challenge appeals on BI. This study reveals that a direct impact of fear mixed with challenge on BI is non-significant. Indirectly, via involvement with the advertisement and attitudes toward help advertisement, fear mixed with challenge positively influenced help-seeking intentions. This study represents an important step toward enhancing help-seeking intentions in at-risk gamblers by leveraging emotional advertising campaigns to promote harm minimisation in the problem gambling context.