Reports an experiment among 40 smokers and 40 nonsmokers testing a hypothesized Fear Arousal * Reassurance interaction effect on attitudes toward smoking and on the belief that smoking causes lung cancer. The interaction effect was confirmed for the beliefs of smokers: increments in fear arousal produced greater increments in belief under high-reassurance than under low-reassurance conditions. Contrary to predictions based upon the alleged effects of fear arousal in punishment vs. avoidance situations, there were no significant triple-order interactions involving smokers vs. nonsmokers, nor were there any significant Smoking * Fear interaction effects on the dependent variables. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2016 APA, all rights reserved)