Curiosity, Surprise, and the Recall of Tobacco-Related Health Information in Adolescents

Abstract

A key goal of health communications designed to prevent smoking initiation during adolescence is for the tobacco-related information to be retained in memory beyond immediate message exposure. Here, we test the role for epistemic emotions, specifically curiosity and surprise, in facilitating memory for tobacco-related health information. Participants (n = 294 never-smoking adolescents, ages 14–16 years) performed a trivia guessing task wherein they guessed the answers to general trivia and smoking-related trivia questions. A subset of participants (n = 154) completed a surprise trivia memory task one week later and answered the previously viewed questions. Results indicate that curiosity about the answers to smoking-related trivia is associated with more accurate recall of smoking-related trivia answers one week later. Surprise also facilitated memory for smoking-related trivia, but the association was limited to cases where confidence in prior knowledge was low. Indeed, when participants had high confidence in their prior knowledge, surprise about the answer to trivia questions was associated with worse recall. Findings suggest that engendering states of curiosity for smoking-related information may facilitate retention of that information in never-smoking adolescents and highlight the need to examine both surprise and confidence in health communications to avoid low message recall.

Acknowledgments

D.M.L acknowledges support from the from the National Institute on Drug Abuse (K01 DA047417) and the Brain & Behavior Research Foundation. The views and conclusions contained in this document are those of the authors and should not be interpreted as representing the official policies of the funders.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

All data reported on in the present study are available at the Open Science Foundation: https://osf.io/6gfm5/?view_only=c3b7cb54152f45498e6300aeb3c6629e.

Citation Diversity Statement

Recent work in several fields has identified a bias in citation practices such that papers from women and other minority scholars are under-cited relative to the number of such papers in the field (Caplar, Tacchella, & Birrer, 2017; Chakravartty, Kuo, Grubbs, & McIlwain, 2018; Dion, Sumner, & Mitchell, 2018; Dworkin et al., 2020; Maliniak, Powers, & Walter, 2013; Wang et al., 2021). Here we sought to proactively consider choosing references that reflect the diversity of the field in thought, form of contribution, gender, and other factors. First, we obtained the predicted gender of the first and last author of each reference by using databases that store the probability of a first name being carried by a woman (Zhou et al., 2020). By this measure (and excluding self-citations to the first and last authors of our current paper), our references contain 17.65% woman(first)/woman(last), 18.78% man/woman, 21.84% woman/man, and 41.74% man/man. This method is limited in that a) names, pronouns, and social media profiles used to construct the databases may not, in every case, be indicative of gender identity and b) it cannot account for intersex, non-binary, or transgender people. We look forward to future work that could help us to better understand how to support equitable practices in science.

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/10810730.2023.2224254

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Brain and Behavior Research Foundation and National Institute on Drug Abuse [K01 DA047417].