Abstract

Mass media can powerfully affect health decision-making. Pre-testing through focus groups or surveys is a standard, though inconsistent, predictor of effectiveness. Converging evidence demonstrates that activity within brain systems associated with self-related processing can predict individual behavior in response to health messages. Preliminary evidence also suggests that neural activity in small groups can forecast population-level campaign outcomes. Less is known about the psychological processes that link neural activity and population-level outcomes, or how these predictions are affected by message content. We exposed 50 smokers to antismoking messages and used their aggregated neural activity within a ‘self-localizer’ defined region of medial prefrontal cortex to predict the success of the same campaign messages at the population level (n = 400 000 emails). Results demonstrate that: (i) independently localized neural activity during health message exposure complements existing self-report data in predicting population-level campaign responses (model combined R2 up to 0.65) and (ii) this relationship depends on message content—self-related neural processing predicts outcomes in response to strong negative arguments against smoking and not in response to compositionally similar neutral images. These data advance understanding of the psychological link between brain and large-scale behavior and may aid the construction of more effective media health campaigns.

Details

Title
Functional brain imaging predicts public health campaign success
Author
Falk, Emily B 1 ; Matthew Brook O’Donnell 2 ; Tompson, Steven 3 ; Gonzalez, Richard 4 ; Sonya Dal Cin 5 ; Strecher, Victor 6 ; Cummings, Kenneth Michael 7 ; An, Lawrence 8 

 Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA; Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA 
 Annenberg School for Communication, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19104, USA 
 Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA 
 Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA; Department of Psychology, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA 
 Research Center for Group Dynamics, Institute for Social Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48106, USA; Department of Communication Studies 
 Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA 
 Department of Psychiatry & Behavioral Sciences, Medical University of South Carolina, Charleston, SC 29425, USA 
 Center for Health Communications Research, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA; Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA 
Pages
204-214
Publication year
2016
Publication date
Feb 2016
Publisher
Oxford University Press
ISSN
17495016
e-ISSN
17495024
Source type
Scholarly Journal
Language of publication
English
ProQuest document ID
3171528792
Copyright
© The Author(s) (2015). Published by Oxford University Press. This work is published under http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/ (the “License”). Notwithstanding the ProQuest Terms and Conditions, you may use this content in accordance with the terms of the License.