Doré BP, Scholz C, Baek EC, Falk EB. Health news sharing is reflected in distributed reward-related brain activity.
Soc Cogn Affect Neurosci 2020;
15:1111-1119. [PMID:
33064817 PMCID:
PMC7657450 DOI:
10.1093/scan/nsaa129]
[Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [What about the content of this article? (0)] [Affiliation(s)] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/06/2019] [Revised: 09/04/2020] [Accepted: 10/12/2020] [Indexed: 11/14/2022] Open
Abstract
Neuroimaging has identified individual brain regions, but not yet whole-brain patterns, that correlate with the population impact of health messaging. We used neuroimaging to measure whole-brain responses to health news articles across two studies. Beyond activity in core reward value-related regions (ventral striatum, ventromedial prefrontal cortex), our approach leveraged whole-brain responses to each article, quantifying expression of a distributed pattern meta-analytically associated with reward valuation. The results indicated that expression of this whole-brain pattern was associated with population-level sharing of these articles beyond previously identified brain regions and self-report variables. Further, the efficacy of the meta-analytic pattern was not reducible to patterns within core reward value-related regions but rather depended on larger-scale patterns. Overall, this work shows that a reward-related pattern of whole-brain activity is related to health information sharing, advancing neuroscience models of the mechanisms underlying the spread of health information through a population.
Collapse