Linking Collectively Shared Brain Responses During Anti-Smoking Messaging to Population-Level Memory

• In Event: Brains, Bodies, and Health Communication

Abstract

Mass mediated public service announcements (PSAs) are critical for the prevention of adolescent smoking, but questions remain about how these messages are received and transmitted into memory, and how these processes relate to the population-level success of messages. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure the shared processing of the FDA’s The Real Cost anti-smoking PSAs in a sample of adolescent non-smokers, the campaign’s target audience, and linked these data with responses from a nationally representative survey of this group. Specifically, we used intersubject correlation analysis to quantify how similarly the brains of audience members respond to each PSA and thus become collectively engaged with the message content. From the national survey, we obtained a measure of message memorability for each PSA, operationalized as aided message recall. We then combined the neural and population-level data for each PSA to ascertain whether the collective brain response to a message is associated with population-level memorability of the messages. We found that messages that prompted more similar brain responses across adolescent viewers in the medial prefrontal and parietal cortex, regions associated with self-related processing and memory encoding, are better(Schmitz & Johnson, 2007) recalled at the population level. These results suggest evidence of a link between micro-level mechanisms of message reception and macro-level memory effects, and suggests a possible strategy for predicting which messages will stick with a media campaign’s target audience.

Authors

• Ralf Schmaelzle, Michigan State U

• Elissa Kranzler, U of Pennsylvania

• Rui Pei, U of Pennsylvania

• Matthew Brook O'Donnell, U of Pennsylvania

• Robert Hornik, U of Pennsylvania

• Emily Falk, U of Pennsylvania