Deliberation and Valence as Dissociable Components of Counterarguing among Smokers: Evidence from Neuroimaging and Quantitative Linguistic Analysis

ABSTRACT

Counterarguing is a key obstacle to successful persuasion. However, the difficulty of directly measuring counterarguing during message exposure limits knowledge of the underlying mechanisms. The current study combines neuroimaging and linguistic measures to unpack neurocognitive and psychological mechanisms associated with counterarguing among a sample of established smokers in response to anti-smoking messaging. We capture participants’ neural activity in brain regions associated with effortful deliberation and negative argumentation during message exposure, and link it with their subsequent language patterns to further understanding of counterarguing in the brain. Greater brain activity within key regions of interest associated with deliberation and negative argumentation is associated with greater cognitive depth and less positivity in the post-scan message descriptions, respectively, among those who have lower intention to change their smoking behavior. We connect these neural representations of counterarguing with psychological theories and discuss implications that may increase the impact of persuasive communications.

Acknowledgments

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Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed on the publisher’s website.

Notes

1. Each categorical word score is the proportion of words in each text belonging to the specific category.

2. While more participants were on the lower end of the scale, the intention to change variable still demonstrated sufficient variation in our sample. See Online Supplementary Materials Appendix G and Figure S1 for the frequency distribution of the variable. Zero-order correlations of the focal variables (independent, dependent, and moderator variables) at the person and ad levels are summarized in Table S1 on Online Supplementary Materials.

3. Although a more generally and frequently used multiple-item perceived message effectiveness scale (e.g., Zhao et al., 2011) would be ideal, the use of a multi-item scale was not feasible in the fMRI scanner due to limitations related to cost, fatigue, and body movement in the scanner. We thus only used a one-item measure to assess the degree to which each ad made the smoker want to quit.

4. Sensitivity analyses which excluded these control variables from the models were also conducted. The results confirmed that the patterns observed still held stable, further indicating the robustness of our findings (see Online Supplementary Materials Table S4 for details).

Additional information

Funding

Research reported in this publication was supported by National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director’s New Innovator Award (1DP2DA035156-01), and the National Cancer Institute (NCI) of the NIH and the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) Center for Tobacco Products (CTP) under Award Number P50CA179546.