Self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messages and subsequent behavior change

Abstract

Health communications can be an effective way to increase positive health behaviors and decrease negative health behaviors; however, those at highest risk are often most defensive and least open to such messages. For example, increasing physical activity among sedentary individuals affects a wide range of important mental and physical health outcomes, but has proven a challenging task. Affirming core values (i.e., self-affirmation) before message exposure is a psychological technique that can increase the effectiveness of a wide range of interventions in health and other domains; however, the neural mechanisms of affirmation's effects have not been studied. We used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to examine neural processes associated with affirmation effects during exposure to potentially threatening health messages. We focused on an a priori defined region of interest (ROI) in ventromedial prefrontal cortex (VMPFC), a brain region selected for its association with self-related processing and positive valuation. Consistent with our hypotheses, those in the self-affirmation condition produced more activity in VMPFC during exposure to health messages and went on to increase their objectively measured activity levels more. These findings suggest that affirmation of core values may exert its effects by allowing at-risk individuals to see the self-relevance and value in otherwise-threatening messages.self-affirmation | fMRI | behavior change | VMPFC | physical activity

Network neuroscience

“…These successes depend on a fundamental understanding of the network interactions and the energy landscape defining how the brain moves between different states 101 , which predict not only common brain states, but also the probability of transitioning between them. In addition to methodological approaches to understanding these landscapes, open areas of inquiry include whether one can predict cognitive function from structural or functional network architecture 102 , predict disease onset or progression from early or pre-clinical data 103 , predict behavioral responses to health messaging 104 , or predict optimal strategies for early intervention.…”

Dispositional Mindfulness Predicts Adaptive Affective Responses to Health Messages and Increased Exercise Motivation

“…This study was a part of a larger investigation on neural predictors of health behavior change (reported in Cascio et al, 2016; Falk et al, 2015). Although health related outcomes are included in those previous reports, no reports using this data have focused on individual differences in mindfulness and subsequent motivation changes.…”

Be Strong Enough to Say No: Self-Affirmation Increases Rejection to Unfair Offers

“…Another alternative interpretation is that self-affirmation made people blind to the proposer’s feelings. Recent fMRI studies, however, have found that self-affirmation produces heightened activity in the ventromedial prefrontal cortex (vmPFC; Falk et al, 2015; Cascio et al, 2016), which is a brain area crucial for empathy (Botvinick et al, 2005). These findings suggest that affirmed participants might know better about how the proposers felt than unaffirmed participants.…”

“…A first ERP study showed that self-affirmation enlarges the error-related negativity (ERN) component, the amplitude of which further predicts performance errors, suggesting that self-affirmation increases the openness to mistakes via enhanced error-monitoring (Legault et al, 2012). A recent fMRI study indicated that self-affirmation increases the neural activity of vmPFC in response to health risk information, which in turn predicts declines in sedentary behavior (Falk et al, 2015). These findings suggest that self-affirmation reduces defensiveness by viewing otherwise threatening information as self-relevant.…”