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Category: Project

Description: The field of prevention neuroscience is organized around understanding the neural mechanisms that underpin health attitude and behavior change. Numerous studies demonstrate that neural activity in response to persuasive messages can accurately predict health attitudes and behavior change, and that adding neural activity to traditional self-report measures results in substantially better prediction models. However, current studies have only identified a small handful of neural structures that are commonly recruited during persuasive message processing and the extent to which these (and other) structures are sensitive to numerous individual difference factors remains largely unknown. In this project we apply a multi-dimensional similarity-based individual differences analysis to explore which individual factors – including characteristics of messages and target audiences – drive patterns of brain activity to be more or less similar across individuals encountering the same anti-drug public service announcements (PSAs). We demonstrate that several ensembles of brain regions show response patterns that are driven by a variety of unique factors. These results are discussed in terms of their implications for neural models of persuasion, prevention neuroscience and message tailoring, and methodological implications for future research.