Elsevier

Biological Psychiatry

Volume 65, Issue 2, 15 January 2009, Pages 165-168
Biological Psychiatry

Research Report
Neural Correlates of Message Tailoring and Self-Relatedness in Smoking Cessation Programming

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biopsych.2008.08.030Get rights and content

Background

Smoking leads to illnesses including addiction, cancer, and cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. Different intervention programs have become available. In the past decade, providing tailored smoking cessation messages has been shown to be more effective in inducing smoking cessation than one-size-fits-all interventions. However, little is known about the brain responses of smokers when they receive tailored smoking cessation messages.

Methods

A neuroimaging study using blocked and event-related designs examined neural activity in 24 smokers exposed to high-tailored and low-tailored smoking cessation messages.

Results

In both blocked and event-related conditions, rostral medial prefrontal cortex and precuneus/posterior cingulate were engaged more during the processing of high-tailored smoking cessation messages than low-tailored smoking cessation messages.

Conclusions

The activation patterns of smokers to tailored cessation messages show involvement of brain areas commonly implicated in self-related processing. Results seem to add support to the suggested role of self-relevance in tailored cessation programs, where previous studies have shown a potential mediating role of self-relevance on smoking abstinence. The findings are relevant to understanding the cognitive mechanisms underlying tailored message processing and might point to new directions for testing response to health communications programming.

Section snippets

Methods and Materials

This is a within-subjects design. All participants received high- and low-tailored blocked messages as well as high-tailored (“smokes 20 cigarettes a day,” “smokes when talking on the phone”), low-tailored (“smokes a lot of cigarettes,” “smokes during daily routines”), and generic smoking cessation event-related statements (“quitting is not easy,” “stress is a part of all of our lives”) (Supplement 1).

Figure 1 presents the paradigm. Blocked conditions were always followed by event-related

Post-Scan Ratings Data

We examined participants' ratings of high-tailored, low-tailored, and generic smoking cessation statements in the event-related conditions in terms of perception of personally written for them. We found, consistent with past research (7), a main effect of the degree of tailoring on the subjective ratings [F(2,44) = 6.66, p < .005]. Participants rated high-tailored smoking cessation statements as more personally written for them than low-tailored smoking cessation statements, means 5.68 (SD =

Discussion

Tailored smoking cessation statements overall engaged rMPFC and precuneus/posterior cingulate, relative to generic smoking cessation statements. High-tailored messages also showed greater activity in the same areas relative to low-tailored messages, in both the blocked and event-related conditions. Participants subjectively rated the high-tailored smoking cessation messages as being more personally written for them.

Although rMPFC and precuneus/posterior cingulate activations might be involved

References (19)

There are more references available in the full text version of this article.

Cited by (0)

View full text