Communicative strategies of threat representation in Russian-language social advertising: gender variability in the perception of implicit and explicit meanings

Background. Enhancing the conversion rate of social discourse necessitates overcoming communicative resistance, with gender acting as a significant yet understudied variable regarding threat representation. Existing research predominantly focuses on commercial marketing, leaving the pragmatics of threats in social advertising without due attention. Purpose. The study aims to classify strategies for threat transmission in creolized texts and identify gender-specific patterns in their decoding. Materials and methods. The empirical basis comprised three social advertising posters (ecology, road safety). The psycholinguistic experiment involved 120 respondents (1:1 gender balance). The free association method was utilized followed by qualimetry of reactions according to semantic type and valence. Results. It was established that the female audience is inclined towards interpreting implicit signals via axiological and emotional markers, whereas the male group perceives explicit directives and statistics more effectively. The mixed strategy is deemed most universal, although for men there persists a risk of activating positive concepts instead of threat.