PHILADELPHIA, Oct. 28 (UPI) -- By imaging the brains of smokers while they watched anti-smoking public service announcements, researchers were able to predict which ads would fare the best.
The experiment was conducted by public health researchers at the universities of Pennsylvania and Michigan. The brains of 50 smokers in Michigan were monitored using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) as they viewed, one by one, 40 anti-smoking images.
Spikes in brain activity were recorded as participants cycled through the ads. Researchers paid special attention to activity in the medial prefrontal cortex, an area of the brain involved in filtering information -- deciding what's important and what's not.
Researchers hypothesized the images eliciting the greatest amount of brain activity would perform the best in real-world email campaigns. They were right.
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The images were emailed to 800,000 smokers in New York. Each featured the message: "Quit smoking. Start Living." The emails included links to resources to help smokers quit.
Those that had most excited the brains of Michigan smokers earned the highest click through rates from New York smokers. By measuring the brain, researchers effectively predicted the effectiveness of a public service announcement.
The images were largely negative, undermining research that suggests negative messaging causes recipients to take a colder, defensive posture.
In this case, however, the negativity was captured by images not words.
"If you ask people what they plan to do or how they feel about a message, you one set of answers," Emily Falk, a professor at Pennsylvania's Annenberg School for Communication, explained in a press release.
"Often the brain gives a different set of answers, which may help make public health campaigns more successful," Falk said. "My hope is that moving forward, we might be able to use what we learned from this study and from other studies to design messages that are going to help people quit smoking and make them healthier and happier in the long run."
The new research was published in the journal Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience.
