Drinking and responses to antidrinking messages among young adults: An fMRI study

Abstract

Young adults consume most of their alcohol by binge drinking, and more than onethird report binge drinking in the past month. Some will transition out of excessive drinking, while others will maintain or increase alcohol use into adulthood. Public health campaigns depicting negative consequences of drinking have shown some efficacy at reducing this behavior. However, substance use in dependent individuals is governed in part by automatic or habitual responses to drug cues rather than the consequences. This study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure neural responses to drinking cues and drinking cues paired with antidrinking messages among young adults who binge drink (N = 30). This study also explored responses to smoking cues and antismoking messages. Neural responses were also compared between drinking/smoking and neutral cues. Self-reported drinking and smoking were collected at baseline, postscan, and 1 month. Results indicate that activity in the ventral striatum-implicated in reward processing-was lower for drinking cues paired with antidrinking messages than drinking cues. This difference was less pronounced in young adults who reported greater baseline past month drinking quantity. Past month drinking quantity decreased from baseline to 1 month. Further, young adults who showed higher activity during antidrinking messages in the medial prefrontal cortex-implicated in processing message self-relevance-reported a greater decrease in past month drinking frequency from baseline to 1 month. Findings may help to identify young adults who are at risk for continued heavy drinking in adulthood and inform interventions aimed to reduce drinking and reward in young adults. K E Y W O R D S alcohol use, antidrinking messages, devaluation, health messaging, young adult 1 | INTRODUCTION Young adulthood (ages 18-25) 1 is a critical developmental period typically associated with increased health-risk behaviors including alcohol use. 2 Alcohol use typically begins in late adolescence (ages 16-20) when youth are experiencing dramatic neural, physical, emotional, and social changes. 3 Alcohol use then escalates during the transition to young adulthood, with increased independence and opportunity and decreased parental guidance and monitoring. 2 Nearly 60% of young adults reported alcohol use in the past month. 4 Alcohol use in young adulthood is often excessive, 4-6 including meeting criteria for binge drinking-consuming more than five drinks on one occasion for males or more than four drinks on one occasion for females. 4,7 Young adults consume more than 90% of their alcohol

Neural Responses to Hedonic and Utilitarian Banner Ads: An fMRI Study

“…In fact, these results are in line with the findings of Couwenberg et al (2017), who found that object identification and self-relevance processing are responsible for higher online ad effectiveness. Investigations in the field of health advertising support our findings (Chua et al 2011; Garrison et al 2021), as they conclude that self-related brain areas (and not reward-associated ones) also have the ability to forecast changes in individual behavior. The recent study by Motoki et al (2020) interestingly stated that social- and value-related (and not reward-associated) brain areas forecast the viral marketing success of internet ads, suggesting that the role of activity in value and mentalizing-related brain regions may become crucial when forecasting the success of online ads, even more than the reward networks.…”