Health comm meets heartbeats
Dr. Russell Clayton on how psychophysiology can reveal insights into effective messaging strategies
I first met Russell Clayton as a fellow graduate student at a health communication conference in Kentucky in the spring of 2012. I was recovering from hip surgery and hobbling around the hotel on my first outing without the giant hip brace and crutches I had been relying on the previous six weeks.
Tired, I sat down at the first table I could reach. It was a fortuitous spot to rest. Twelve years later, I am still chatting with and learning from my good friend, who is now Dr. Russell Clayton, an award-winning, highly cited associate professor at Florida State University.
Dr. Clayton sat down with me to discuss his research on smoking cessation and vaping campaigns using (primarily) media psychophsyiological measures and methods. Watch the video of our interview below!
Media psychophsyiology is a mouthful, but it is just the use of measures like heart rate, facial muscle activity, and sweat gland activity to see how the body is reacting, in real time, to messages.
As Dr. Clayton tells me, “with psychophysiological data, we can ask, how did the message have an effect? And at what time did these responses occur? We can answer those questions with psychophysiological and self report data triangulated even with maybe memory measures. That provides a holistic approach to understanding how effective a message is. But even better, how to better optimize that message.”
An important domain where Dr. Clayton has applied these dynamic and automatic responses to health messages in studying responses to tobacco cessation messages. One study, in particular, looked at how smokers in withdrawal respond to messages encouraging them to quite. The summary of this work finds that smokers experiencing nicotine withdrawal are going to respond differently to these messages than you may expect.
One big take-away: Including images of tobacco increases cravings and worsens memory for the content of the message. Dr. Clayton and his colleagues have also started to find similar outcomes with showing vapor in anti-vaping public service announcements, too. In the video, you can hear more about Dr. Clayton’s explanation for this finding and his advice for communicators making anti-smoking videos that target current smokers or those who are still trying to quit.
“Smokers like seeing smoking, just like they like the smell of it. It captures their attention. That is an automatic response, conditioned by by smoking over time. And so it captures their attention when they see it in a message. But disgust images are also often used in these same messages, disgust being diseased organs, yellow teeth, body, envelope, violations, etc.”
“And what we found with tobacco smokers is they paid attention to messages with smoking images, until the same messages depicted disgust images. At that point, they avoided those messages. They reported craving, but also equal levels of intentions to quit smoking. So, this led us to this idea of motivational dissonance. That looks good, but I know I shouldn't do it - response”
Another way that Dr. Clayton has utilized psychophysiological measures to better be able to tell when audiences are feeling defensive about a health message. In health communication, this is known as reactance, or the anger and negative thoughts you have whenever someone tells you to do something, thereby removing some of your freedom to make your own choices.
Dr. Clayton and his colleagues have found that warning audiences that more dogmatic language is coming can help diminish reactance to anti-vaping messages. He has also found that showing audiences short inspiring entertainment messages before a health message (like an anti-binge-drinking public service announcement) can help lessen reactance. In our interview, Dr. Clayton talks about some additional practical strategies message creators can use to minimize reactance to health messages.
We also talk about how to get the attention of people who may benefit from these health messages in a crowded media environment, what Dr. Clayton’s favorite psychophysiological measure is (and why). Take a listen and let me know what you think! After you have watched our video, be sure to check out Dr. Clayton’s chapter on media psychophysiology in my co-edited book on Emotions and Digital Media.
A big thanks, again, to Dr. Russell Clayton for being this month’s interviewee on Healthy Media!
More next week!