Sage Journals: Discover world-class research

Abstract

Most guidelines on warning design recommend using an appropriate signal word that connotes the degree of hazard involved. Usually three levels of signal words, DANGER, WARNING, and CAUTION are suggested for warnings that convey high to low degrees of hazard. The purposes of the present research were threefold. The first goal was to examine whether these terms differed in implied hazard level. The second goal was to determine whether an additional group of five words recommended in guidelines or used in previous research differed in connoted hazard level. The third goal was to explore the possibility of increasing the number and range of words that connote different levels of hazard. Subjects rated a list of 84 potential signal words on six questions assessing strength, severity of implied injury, likelihood of implied injury, attention-gettingness, carefulness, and understandability. The results indicated that DANGER connoted greater strength (arousal) than WARNING and CAUTION, but the results failed to show a difference between WARNING and CAUTION. Among other words tested, DEADLY was seen as having strongest arousal connotation, and NOTE the least. From the long list of 84 terms, a “short” list of 20 signal words was developed based on understandability, low variability, shortness of word, and frequency of use. It is suggested that an expanded list of signal words might alleviate potential problems of habituation from overuse of the currently recommended terms.

Get full access to this article

View all access options for this article.

References

ANSI (1972). American National Standard Specification for Accident Prevention Signs: Z35.1. New York: American National Standards Institute.

ANSI (1988). American National Standard on Product Safety Signs: Z535.4 - Draft. New York: American National Standards Institute.

Bresnahan

T. F.

Bryk

(1975). The hazard association values of accident-prevention signs. Professional Safety, January, 17–25.

Cowan

(1988). Evolving conceptions of memory storage, selective attention, and their mutual constraints within the human information-processing system. Psychological Bulletin, 104, 163–191.

Devlin

(1982). A Dictionary of Synonyms and Antonyms. New York: Warner Books.

FMC (1985). Product Safety Sign and Label System. Santa Clara, CA: FMC Corporation.

Francis

W. N.

Kucera

(1982). Frequency Analysis of English Usage. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Leonard

S. D.

Karnes

E. W.

Schneider

(1988). Scale values for warning symbols and words. In Aghazadeh

(Ed.) Trends in Ergonomics/Human F actors V. Amsterdam: Elsevier. 669–674.

Leonard

S. D.

Matthews

Karnes

E. W.

(1986). How does the population interpret warning signals? Proceedings of the 30th Annual Meeting of the Human Factors Society, Santa Monica, CA: Human Factors Society, 116–120.

10.

Morehead

A. H.

(1982). Roget's College Thesaurus. New York: World Publishing.

11.

New Webster's Dictionary of the English Language. (1975). New York: Consolidated Book Publishers.

12.

Thorndike

E. L.

Lorge

(1944). The Teacher's Word Book of 30,000 Words. New York: Teachers College Press, Columbia University.

13.

Ursic

(1984). The impact of safety warnings on perception and memory. Human Factors, 26, 677–682.

14.

Westinghouse (1981). Westinghouse Product Safety Label Handbook. Trafford, PA: Westinghouse Printing Division.

15.

Wogalter

M. S.

Godfrey

S. S.

Fontenelle

G. A.

Desaulniers

D. R.

Rothstein

P. R.

Laughery

K. R.

(1987). Effectiveness of warnings. Human Factors, 29, 599–612.

Broadening the Range of Signal Words

Abstract

Get full access to this article

References