8.7 Reducing Emotions

Sometimes the goal of the sender is to not get the receiver emotionally worked up: it’s instead to calm them down. To quote another Bob Marley lyric, “Don’t worry about a thing; every little thing’s gonna be alright” (from the song Three Little Birds). If you are a pediatrician, for example, a large percentage of your workday must consist of telling parents “Your child is fine; it’s just a rash/cold/scrape — that’s perfectly normal.”

Reassurances are a particularly tricky kind of message to pull off, for a variety of reasons:

To some people, reassurances backfire and produce concern instead (there’s the old joke about the bored airline pilot who got on the PA system and told the passengers “There is no cause for alarm” just to watch them panic).

Reassurances intended to allay fears sometimes bring up new fears that the receiver hadn’t thought of before. Imagine a patient who comes in to a doctor due to abdominal pain and fatigue, and the doctor wants to reassure them by ruling out the worst things first. The patient hasn’t mentioned cancer, but the doctor wonders if they are worried about that and if so, thinks they can nip that concern in the bud. So the doctor says, “Well, I ruled out pancreatic cancer, so that’s one less thing to worry about.” Meanwhile, the patient just thought it might be an ulcer and cancer hadn’t crossed his mind — but now he can’t stop worrying about cancer, and wondering if the doctor checked for other kinds besides pancreatic. Instead of nipping a worry in the bud, the doctor introduced new worries for the patient to deal with.

It can be a trick: sometimes, a reassurance is a ruse to coax you into letting your guard down. Soldiers realize this, and know better than to relax too much when an enemy lays down their guns or raises their hands in surrender. And the reason some people don’t trust the government is because they know about the history of government agencies endangering citizens while also reassuring them. For example, some of the cruelest experiments ever conducted on others, including the Tuskegee Syphilis Study and Project MKUltra (where people were given high doses of LSD without their knowledge), must have involved telling the subjects that they would be okay. People near the 1945 Trinity Test of the first atom bomb were told that it was just an explosion at the nearby dump and “No one worry about anything; everything is fine,” although many of them later died of cancer.

Even without bad intentions or ulterior motives, sometimes the people doing the reassuring are just wrong. Doctors miss warning signs, and those “perfectly normal” diagnoses may be totally inaccurate. When a person says “Everything’s going to be fine,” the other person might legitimately wonder, “How do they know? Can they see into the future?”

What do communication scholars know about how to effectively reassure people? Unfortunately, not much; there is far more research about fear appeals than about calming people down. What little research there is has been in the medical field^[1] (which is why so many examples above are about doctors), and it suggests that the amount of information in the reassurance is a key variable. There’s a big difference between “Don’t worry, you’re fine” and “Blood test results show that your creatinine level is 0.9, which is within normal parameters.” Trusting the source is, of course, the most important factor, which the next chapter addresses. Finally, despite the four complications raised above, reassurances have one advantage over fear appeals: calmness is a more enjoyable emotion than fear, and people like to hear the message “Everything little thing’s gonna be alright” (even if it’s not sung by Bob Marley).