Friday, March 13, 2015

“Self-affirmation alters the brain’s response to health messages and subsequent behavior change”

“Self-affirmation is a psychological technique that is effective in increasing receptivity to interventions across domains from promoting health behaviors in high-risk populations to improving academic performance in underrepresented groups. The neural mechanisms that lead to affirmation’s success, however, are not known. We show that neural responses associated with self-related processing and value in response to an otherwise-threatening health communication intervention can be changed using self-affirmation; furthermore, these neural responses predict objectively measured behavior change in the month following the intervention. These findings suggest that self-affirmation may exert its effects by allowing at-risk individuals to see the self-relevance and value in otherwise-threatening messages and provide a framework for studying neural effects of self-affirmation more broadly.”

And maybe it’s a greater experience of personal power and choice. This is interesting.

No comments:

Post a Comment