Assistant Professor Richard Huskey recently co-authored a study in Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience that looks at brain-network patterns in response to anti-drug persuasive messages. The results of the study give a better idea of how the brain processes the messages, and how to evaluate which messages are more likely to be effective.

Government and public health agencies often want to design-anti drug persuasive messages that target individuals who are at high-risk for drug use, but it is typically difficult to get accurate evaluations of which messages are most effective.  The study used functional magnetic resonance imaging to show that the brain network connectivity patterns differ depending on if someone is at a high or low risk for drug use, and that network connectivity patterns predict message evaluations in two large independent samples (one nationally representative of U.S. teenagers, the other college-aged).

Huskey co-authored the study with faculty from University of California, Santa Barbra including J Michael Mangus, Benjamin Turner and René Weber.