Affective responses to information security threats – The role of threat context and influence on perceived severity

Evidence from organizational studies in employee behaviour and risk perception demonstrates the role of affective states in key areas of work performance. Yet this remains largely un-researched in the context of information security. We address this gap through an empirical study of affective responses to different information security threats, and the associated threat appraisals. Our results show that the pattern of affective responses is significantly different across different threat scenarios, and that concern is consistently the strongest reported affective response. Next, we demonstrate that these negative affective states have a significant influence on threat perceptions and can thus be expected to influence behaviour through this established pathway. Later stages of this research will collect a larger data set to test an integrated model of affect and information security behaviour.